En un lugar de la Mancha

Friday, September 29, 2006 at 10:56 AM

Posted by Jose Campon, Google Book Search Support Team

...de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme...
(At a village of la Mancha whose name I do not wish to remember...)

I was only a kid the first time I heard those words, words that always bring to mind the image of a lanky hidalgo riding a famished horse in the company of the good man Sancho Panza, at the back of a donkey.

I recall immediately giants and windmills, of course, but also extraordinary lands, such as the island of Barataria, mythical objects like Mambrino's helmet or the balsam of Fierabras, the knight of the white moon, idealized doncellas, irony, fun and cruelty -- a feast of creativity, wit and imagination. And against a dark background, the image of its mastermind, Don Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes was born in Spain on September 29th, 1547, and what a life he had: he engaged in several duels, fought against the Turks (where he lost the use of his left hand), was kidnapped and imprisoned in Algeria for 5 years, got married twice and dabbled in all kind of jobs, even while he was writing.

Today, we want to say happy birthday to Don Miguel and pay tribute to his great, imaginative mind. Indeed, he wrote a lot: poems, plays, novellas and novels -- certainly, not just El Quijote.

Curious to find out more? Try an Advanced Book Search by author, browse a bit and discover the richness of his literature. And if you're not a native speaker, El Quijote in its original Spanish is an excellent choice of classic titles with which to practice. Read the full post 0 comments

Madrid's Complutense University opens its library to the world

Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 7:14 AM

Posted by Jens Redmer, Head of Google Book Search, Europe

Out-of-copyright books previously only available to people with access to Madrid’s Complutense University Library, or the money to travel, will now be accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, wherever they live. We are quite literally opening our library to the world. - Carlos Berzosa Alonso-Martínez, Chancellor of the Complutense University of Madrid

Browsing the library stacks at the University Complutense of Madrid is like taking a trip through the great moments of Spanish and Latin American literature: Miguel de Cervantes, Quevedo, Calderón, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Garcilaso de la Vega.

Those authors’ great works soon will be accessible to everyone around the world, as the University Complutense of Madrid -- the largest university library in Spain -- becomes the first Spanish-language library and the second European library to join the Google Books Library Project. This partnership will further enrich Book Search’s multilingual collection of public domain works. In addition to Spanish texts, the university’s collection also includes French, German, Latin, Italian, and English works.

We're honored to be working with the University Complutense of Madrid -- we've been helping people find information for eight years; they have centuries of experience educating people from all over the world. We're looking forward to learning a lot from them. Read the full post 0 comments

Author trivia

Monday, September 25, 2006 at 8:15 AM

Posted by Bethany Poole, Product Marketing Manager

The other day I was looking for a favorite short story -- William Faulkner’s very twisted “A Rose for Emily” -- when I came across a number of books about Faulkner’s life. Intrigued, I started browsing. Pretty soon, I had a new list of books to read, a richer sense of a writer I’ve always admired, and some new-found Faulkner trivia.

For instance, did you know that Faulkner’s original last name was Falkner and that he added the “u” as a tribute to his ancestors? Or that “Billy” got lonely when he left home for the first time at age 20 and wrote regular letters to his parents that were both sentimental and newsy? (Check out this one about a birthday cake his mother sent him.) Seems like a far cry from the man who went on not only to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, but also an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter, working on adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and to Have Not. Howard Hawks' story about convincing Faulkner and Hemingway (two well-known egotists) to work together is a classic.

One of the cool things about using Google Book Search is that it not only helps you find books by the world’s great authors, it also helps you find books about them. Try a search on one of your favorites — you might be surprised by what you find. Read the full post 0 comments

The great American novelist

Friday, September 22, 2006 at 9:06 AM

Posted by Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence: An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was uncanny in his understanding of a writer's trajectory, but he sold himself a little short. On what would have been the weekend of his 110th birthday, we celebrate one of the defining writers of the "Jazz Age" for the reading pleasure offered in his precious books.

You can find all five Fitzgerald novels and many stories in Google Book Search, including his first, This Side of Paradise, a roman à clef and rollicking portrayal of his time at Princeton. This is the one for anyone interested in reading the book about the flappers.

We're glad to be able to help people find that famous last phrase of his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in its many fine editions, information on his time at Princeton, his wife Zelda, and even -- appropriate as we think of his birth -- his distant kinship with Francis Scott Key. We hope to help people realize that Fitzgerald is more than an author just for schoolmasters (and their students, of course) but for all of today's readers interested in the best American writing. Read the full post 0 comments

Find it at the library

Wednesday, September 20, 2006 at 4:00 PM

Posted by Jodi Healy, Library Partnership Team

Recently, we started including "Find this book in a library" links on more (a lot more!) books in Google Book Search to help readers locate nearby libraries where they can borrow titles of interest.


These links direct you to OCLC's Open WorldCat, and this change gives you yet another reason to drop into your local library. (After all, September is Library Card Sign-up Month!) Read the full post 0 comments

Explore banned books

Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 2:03 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

It was in Jim Hosney's 11th grade English class (aptly called "Great Books") where I first read Faulkner, Joyce, Conrad, Ellison, and Nabokov. I remember getting lost in the description of lightbulbs and Louis Armstrong in the beginning of Invisible Man, struggling through Joyce, and crying on an airplane as I finished Heart of Darkness. We questioned Humbert Humbert's reliability as a narrator and examined Faulkner's style in light of feminist theory. It was amazing.

But every year, there are hundreds of attempts to restrict access to these great books and many others -- by authors as diverse as Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, and Judy Blume -- through challenges to their inclusion in school curricula as well as libraries. So I'm excited to share the news that this year, Google is joining the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries and bookstores across the country in celebrating the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week (September 23rd-30th).

How are we celebrating? Starting today, you can visit http://www.google.com/bannedbooks to explore 42 banned or challenged books honored by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as among the Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. You can see which of these novels have been targeted for banning, find out where you can buy or borrow them, and check out what authors and critics have to say by browsing related books.

We're proud to highlight these books, and we hope this collection helps you rediscover old favorites, sparks your interest in books you haven't read before, and gives you new cause to celebrate your freedom to read. Read the full post 0 comments

Killer books

Thursday, September 07, 2006 at 6:43 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

In the main lobby at the Googleplex, there's a display showing a three-dimensional globe, with exploding geysers of color representing search queries typed in by people around the world. It's always fascinating -- even a little awe-inspiring -- to see such a vivid demonstration of people's curiosity.

I had a similar feeling the other day when a colleague showed me this blog by Laura James, Esq. -- a true crime aficionado and history buff who tracks down and publishes information about "forgotten true crime stories and the fascinating people who wrote them." One of her recent discoveries: out-of-copyright crime history books in Google Book Search:

So far, the gem of the Google crime collection is Hanging in Chains, a book by Albert Hartshorne published in 1891. The book details severe punishments through time and cultures, covering everything from the disposal of murderers in ancient Egypt all the way up through various European manifestations of severe punishments like gibbeting or hanging in chains -- a punishment not solely reserved for pirates, and one used until well into the nineteenth century. Until Google digitized the book, you'd be hard-pressed to find a copy for less than a hundred bucks. Now it's free.

I can hardly believe our collective luck at having these amazing old books, all of them out of print for generations, free, online, and text-searchable. Wow. Enjoy!

It's great to know we're helping people unearth hard-to-find books that satisfy their curiosity -- about historical events and every other topic imaginable. (Speaking of history, I can't resist adding a pointer to our brand new News Archive Search, which lets people search news articles stretching back more than 200 years. Give it a try.) Read the full post 0 comments

DIANE Publishing opens books for global discovery

Wednesday, September 06, 2006 at 2:34 PM

Posted by Laura Driussi, Strategic Partner Manager

Good news for policymakers, researchers and others looking for key government documents. Recently, DIANE Publishing, which reprints a wide variety of government publications, made all of its titles in Google Book Search 100 percent viewable. While the Partner Program's default settings limit people to viewing 20 percent of any title, you're now free to read every page of every DIANE publication in the index. Explains Herman Baron, President of DIANE Publishing,

Our mission has always been to carefully select U.S. government reports and publish them to make it easier for readers to access this valuable information. Google Book Search provides a way for us to make these documents available to Google users worldwide. The free flow of government information to a democratic society is utmost in our mind. We're pleased to offer everything from the U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy to a 1997 House committee hearing on Protecting the Future of Social Security to this GAO report on deterring the illegal diamond trade.

Feel like browsing? Try an advanced search by publisher to check out the other government reports DIANE has made fully viewable online. Read the full post 0 comments

From the mail bag: How can I see more of this book?

Tuesday, September 05, 2006 at 3:56 PM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Book Search Support Team

Suppose you're searching on Google for books about, oh, say, the design of electrical installations. You see links pop up showing book results from Google Book Search. It looks like you've found the perfect book, but you're not quite sure yet. You follow a link and see a page from a book with your search term highlighted. But you're still not sure it's the right book, and you want to see more. What do you do?

That's the question we got from Amutha, who sent us an email asking:

How can I see more pages in the book, A Textbook of Design of Electrical Installations by V.K Jain & Amitabh Bajaj?

For many in-copyright books, such as the one Amutha's interested in, we show a limited preview of pages. In a limited preview, you can browse through a few pages without having to log in by using the navigation arrows at the top right of each book page:


These arrows allow you to page through the available preview pages. If you're browsing a book this way, we won't ask you for any further information.

However, other people, like Joudi, have asked about viewing specific pages:

I attempted to read this page, but I couldn't because you required detailed information. Can you help me?

When we ask you for information, it's because we have a mechanism in place to enforce the limits of the preview. That means that in many cases, we don't show you certain pages unless you're logged in to a Google Account. If you already have an account (like a Gmail or Google Groups account), you're all set -- just plug in your regular login info to continue browsing up to the limit of the preview. If you don't have an account, it's quick and easy to create one, and you'll have better access to the books you find.



But remember, even after you log in, you won't be able to see some pages of the book -- to protect authors and publishers, some portions will remain hidden at all times (it's what we sometimes call the "swiss cheese" effect).

If you've browsed up to the limit and you still want more, you can follow the links to buy the book or borrow it from your local library. Of course, you also have the option of searching specifically for books you can see in full view. Just select the "Full view" radio button on http://books.google.com -- you'll be able to page through the entire text of books that are either out of copyright or displayed in full at the request of the copyright holder. Read the full post 0 comments