Hobby hunting

Monday, October 23, 2006 at 2:51 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Last week I was on a college campus interviewing students. Reading the fine print at the bottom of their resumes, where most students had a "personal interests" section, reminded me of my own hobbies left neglected as of late. From hiking to civil war history, bungee jumping to chess, and dance marathons to "late-night rhyming sessions" these students had it all.

My own favorite hobby -- when I was a college student and since -- is jewelry making. Inspired by these students, I went home to assess my gem collection and dust off some gold wire that I hadn't touched in months. But the inspiration was lacking. I'd been through my books a number of times (Making Designer Bead & Wire Jewelry is a good one for beginners), but I needed something new, so I turned to Google Book Search.

Soon enough, I found a book that seemed particularly promising after reading the sample pages -- so I bought a copy of The Complete Book of Jewelry Making. If you want to dabble yourself, why not try something quick and easy, like Quick & Easy Wire Jewelry: 18 Step-By-Step Projects - Simple to Make, Stunning Results. Or for more of an overview of techniques from anodizing to stone setting, the The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques may be the way to go.

Of course I browse online for inspiration from some of my favorite designers and take a look at tips and how-tos, but sometimes, when you're knee deep in beads and there are little wire pieces scattered around the coffee table, there's something to be said for having a great book in your hands. Read the full post 0 comments

Teen read week

Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 12:19 PM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Support Team

This week is Teen Read Week, promoted by the American Library Association, and the theme for 2006 is "Get Active @ Your Library." We're excited by anything that gets more people reading, and Young Adult fiction is often where the freshest books are being released -- the kinds of unhinged stories that turn teen readers into lifetime book lovers. During this week, we hope that Google Book Search and the Teen Read Week website help teens and adults find books that spark their interest.

On the Teen Read Week site, you can weigh in on your favorite Young Adult books of 2006 by taking a survey (I'm voting for Peeps, Skybreaker, and A Certain Slant of Light). The site also includes radio spots by The Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot, many of whose books are discoverable in Google Book Search.

It's a wonderful time for Young Adult fiction, with exciting titles in all genres coming out each month. For those of you looking for a place to start, check out some of the books honored with the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. They represent a really cool swatch of contemporary YA fiction, and a number of the winners and nominees can be found on Google Book Search, including:

• 2006 Nominee Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, a great collection of unique, dark fantasy short stories about families, elephants, and (what else but) clown assassins.
  
  
• 2005 Nominee Airborn by Kenneth Oppel, an alternate universe adventure story about a teenage boy, airships, and exploration, set against a fantastical Victorian backdrop.
  
  
• 2003 Winner Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers, which follows two intricate narratives (one in the past, one in the present), depicting adolescence in times of war.
  
  
• 2000 Winner Monster by Walter Dean Myers, an unconventional novel as written by a 16-year-old accused felon, told as a makeshift screenplay/journal.

That's only a taste. You can check out the complete list of winners and nominees on the Teen Read Week site. Read the full post 0 comments

Travel plans

Monday, October 16, 2006 at 8:53 PM

Posted by Stephanie Movahhed, Google Book Search Support Team

I love to travel, and when I can't travel, I'm mentally planning for my next trip. These plans can get fairly detailed, so I've become a huge travel guide book fan. Like any seasoned traveler, I've had the requisite conversations over free breakfast in many a dilapidated youth hostel about which guides are better, lighter, or include more relevant details.

While I may have my preferences, I maintain that different guides work for different trips, which is why it's great that you can browse quite a selection of the most well-known names in guide books through Google Book Search and then buy the one that's right for you. This is particularly helpful because many bookstores will only give you one or two titles for some countries, making it difficult to compare across different brands when preparing for a trip. Google Book Search also allows you to browse and even buy those elusive guide book accessories often referenced within the guidebooks themselves, yet maddeningly difficult to find in stores.

Because I love to read, I usually scan my guidebook for suggestions of notable local poetry and prose, which make great companions to the site seeing, sun bathing, and culinary adventuring that make up any trip. I'll often try browsing through a few of these to ensure that the guidebook author's picks for enlightening reads match my taste. For my upcoming trip to India, I found several of the recommended novels on Google Book Search -- including The God of Small Things and The Guide. Sampling a few pages online was enough to assure me that these books would be readable as well as edifying. So indulge your craving for travel guides and world literature -- Google Book Search can help. Read the full post 0 comments

It was a dark and stormy night...

Friday, October 13, 2006 at 11:07 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Google Book Search Support Team

Today is Friday the 13th, a day that's supposed to bring bad luck. Throw in the fact that Halloween is fast approaching, and we'll forgive you if you're practically cowering under your monitor. I'm not very superstitious myself, but something about the darkening days of October puts me a little bit on edge.

What better way to combat fear than with a little humor -- say, by examining one of the most clichéd lines in all of fiction? I am referring, of course, to "It was a dark and stormy night."

Even before I overcame my childhood fear of night-time storms (thunder was a deeply terrifying phenomenon at times), I'm pretty sure the sentence never frightened me. Indeed, every year thousands of people pay tongue-in-cheek tribute to the phrase by entering the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges writers to compose "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."

Of course, even clichés originate sometime and somewhere. In this case, the first written use of the sentence is widely attributed to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, an English writer and politician of the 19th century who began his novel, Paul Clifford, with the now-infamous phrase. It has since been creatively repurposed by writers including Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula K. LeGuin, and...Snoopy (okay, so maybe Snoopy had a little help from Charles Schulz).

I hope you've enjoyed this brief respite from "paraskavedekatriaphobia" (fear of Friday the 13th) -- and that you have as much fun exploring Google Book Search as I do. Read the full post 0 comments

Getting started with the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 7:30 PM

Posted by Ben Bunnell, Library Partnership Team

Today, we announced a new partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison to make a significant portion of their library collection searchable through Google Book Search. As a library partner manager, I'm always excited to work with new partners, and the collections of the UW-Madison libraries and Wisconsin Historical Society Library are welcome additions to the works offered by other Google Book Search partners.

Signing an agreement with a new library is just the beginning -- then it's time to get started making the vision real. Because we are doing non-destructive digitization at high volumes, we work closely with each library partner's staff to digitize their books in a way that is minimally disruptive to patrons. This means working with shelving staff, preservationists, collection specialists -- all the people who make a library function -- to understand the best way to get started. The most rewarding part of my job is getting to know these people and working together to meet the challenges of taking physical books and making them searchable by the world. Read the full post 0 comments

Word sleuth

Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 10:57 PM

Posted by Ramsey Allington, Manager, Google Book Search Support Team

As faithful readers of this blog know, we’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of Google Book Search, so I was excited to see this article by Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe.

Like William Safire, Freeman writes about language, investigating the history and meaning of words and phrases. In this piece, she uses Book Search to find out whether the tender phrase Tom Cruise utters to a teary-eyed Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire -- "You complete me" -- would be anachronistic in a novel set in the 1950s, as a book reviewer claimed.

Writes Freeman (hyperlinks, mine):

[Well], maybe it wasn't a plausible wedding toast for that fictional '50s couple, but the wording wasn't exactly fresh when the Jerry Maguire screenwriter used it. Thanks to Google Book Search, there are examples at our fingertips:

"I hope, for my part, never to be unworthy of him, and we shall be able to complete each other mutually." -- Mme. de Stael's daughter Albertine, writing of her husband-to-be in an 1816 letter.

"Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only wanting a wife to complete him." -- George Meredith, in his hilarious (and underappreciated) 1879 novel The Egoist.

. . .And of course Plato had something to say -- long ago, and in another country -- about humans being pathetic halves of their former perfect selves, longing for their missing complements.

Go ahead, give it a try -- plug in a few "modern" words and phrases (like "dude" or "keep it real"). You might be surprised at where -- and when -- they show up. Read the full post 0 comments

Top ten books: a Google Book Search zeitgeist

Friday, October 06, 2006 at 4:51 AM

Posted by Tom Turvey, Head, Google Book Search Partnerships

I’ve always loved reading the Google Zeitgeist report -- a cumulative snapshot of popular queries that reveal a bit about the current human psyche. Elin Nordegren, the Swedish model who became Tiger Woods’ wife, topped last week’s list of the 15 top-gaining search queries, and this week it’s none other than Dallas Cowboy Terrell Owens who’s been all over the news lately.

Recently, we tried something similar with books from the Google Books Partner Program. No Swedish supermodels or controversial wide receivers in sight. Among the most viewed books are a translation of the Holy Qu’ran, a bestseller about geopolitics, a book on healing by a Nepalese spiritualist, and a textbook about how to build a robot.

For me, the most notable characteristic of our top 10 is that, aside from one title, the list bears little resemblance to bestseller lists. Rather, it includes both current and backlist titles, reflecting the rich diversity of readers’ interests.

So without further ado, here’s our list of most-viewed English language books supplied by our publisher partners for the week of September 17th through 23rd:

• Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers


• Merriam Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms


• Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk


• Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion


• The Holy Qur’an


• Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006


• Hegemony Or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance


• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage


• Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense


• Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot

Read the full post 0 comments

Stories of Mr. Brecht

Thursday, October 05, 2006 at 1:44 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Google Book Search Support Team

As we mentioned in our last post, we're excited to be participating in this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. It might have been in subliminal honor of this event that I started thinking about one of my favorite writers, who just happens to be German as well: Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht is known primarily as a playwright, and with good reason; his works have remained in the public eye since their initial performances, going back to the 1930s. (A version of Mother Courage starring Meryl Streep just ended a successful New York City run last month.) But he's also produced some excellent prose. I'm thinking in particular of Stories of Mr. Keuner, a highly enjoyable book of compact stories that you can preview in Google Book Search. The stories are, in fact, small enough that I can cite one here, called "An aristocratic stance":

Mr. Keuner said: 'I, too, once adopted an aristocratic stance (you know: erect, upright, and proud, head thrown back). I was standing in rising water at the time. I adopted this posture when it rose to my chin.'

This little saying exemplifies many of the tendencies in Brecht's work: a critique of social classes brought out by humor, a heightened awareness of the body, and an image of life as a continuous application of some kind of common sense. You'll find almost all of these qualities -- humor, especially -- in these stories. Almost all of them fit on a single page, which makes this an ideal work to browse on Google Book Search. We hope you'll get in the spirit of Frankfurt and check this book out!

For further reading on Brecht, I suggest taking a look at his diaries, or this highly illuminating essay on Brecht's theater, which also makes mention of our dear Herr Keuner. Read the full post 0 comments

Hallo Frankfurt

Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 10:51 AM

Posted by Jessica Powell, European Corporate Communications Manager

Starting today, publishers, authors, and book lovers from around the world will gather in Frankfurt, Germany for the world's largest book fair.

The Google Book Search team will also be there. We've got plenty of things planned for the event, from the launch of The Literacy Project with LitCam and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning to live demos at our booth (it's booth #M904 in Hall 8 if any of you happen to be making the trek). We'll also be roaming the labyrinthine halls of the fair in the hope of talking to as many book lovers, authors, and publishers as possible to hear their thoughts about Google Book Search.

How have we been preparing for our Germany trip? Some of us are reading up on the Gutenberg printing press, which was invented centuries ago at a site not 40 miles from Frankfurt. Others are brushing up on their German literature: the more erudite are picking up Rilke and Schiller, while some of us are sticking to Grimm's Fairy Tales. And me? I'm just trying to brush up on some German vocabulary before I hit the fair. After all, I wouldn't want to confuse wurst with Faust! Read the full post 0 comments

On the road with Google Book Search

Monday, October 02, 2006 at 8:54 AM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Every once in a while, we hear about an especially intriguing use of Google Book Search. The most recent example: this Top 10 list by Forbes Autos, which gives the company's picks for the top 10 greatest books featuring cars. They use Google Book Search to allow visitors to their site to further explore these books -- including everything from On the Road to Native Son.

According to Annette from ForbesAutos.com,

Our admittedly highly subjective list came about after we asked academics, librarians, authors, poets, journalists, automobile industry executives and others for their suggestions. In culling the final 10, we considered the importance of the piece of writing, the reputation of the author and the role that the vehicle, or vehicles, play in the work -- both as characters in their own right and, where applicable, as symbols. We kept the choices to American literature -- in order to mollify translation concerns, limit our already numerous choices and, if readers are interested, to save room for a future Top 10 Cars of World Literature sequel.

Take a minute to check out the site. You might recall the Rolls-Royce from The Great Gatsby or the Caprice convertible from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but you can also see which vehicles Forbes deems the modern-day equivalents. Read the full post 0 comments