Google's Book Search goes live

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The days of searching round the house for a good book to read are over – you can now search round with net and download one with Google Book Search.

But don’t get too excited – you can only download PDF versions of out-of-copyright books. That does mean you can catch up with your classics, include such literary gems as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Aesop’s Fables, now in the public domain and available for Google to scan and offer online. It might be as well to check your printer paper before you run a copy off though.

You can only search the books by title. However, there’s no separate section for copyrighted works, which are listed, but only offered with limited extracts. The service is part of a larger project that Google is undertaking with universities to digitise the works of several libraries and put them online in a searchable format.Institutions so far signed up include Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, the New York Public Library and most recently, the University of California.

Google Book Search

Via The Register

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Dave Walker
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