anyone know anything interesting about Google Books?

[SlartyBartFast]

can you read any thing?
is it free?



will it make your eyes go square?

[southeastastra]

what is it?

[SlartyBartFast]

oi! that was my question
i heard someone mention it, some student, not to me and thought i would have a look but though somebody was bound to know more than me

[southeastastra]

ooh i found it! looks fab

[funnypeculiar]

As in digitised books to download onto a fancy kindle style e-reader, do you mean?

[southeastastra]

it's great

[whomovedmychocolate]

Oh it's finally up - hurrah! So, it depends on the publisher and author, you can put as much or as little up for perusal as you like. Obviously if you are trying to sell medical books you put up the outcomes and then make people pay for the whole thing to find out how you elicited that result.

Yes tis free.

Will bore the pants off you though.

[whomovedmychocolate]

It's based on the theory of text mining for serendipitous discoveries btw. It's very cool in that sense.

[SlartyBartFast]

thanks for the info

actually i think i might prefer to sit down with a paper back but for students and such looks like a godsend.

[SlartyBartFast]

what?? wmmc??

anyway is it new?

[JudgeNutmeg]

I used google books a lot for essays. They haven't always scanned in all the pages I need but on the whole I find it really useful. My university net library is much slower to load whilst GoogleBooks is faster and has, sometimes, more contemporary literature.

I haven't looked at anything other than education texts so my answer is incomplete. I do think that google has so many different useful add-ons now, it's fab.

[funnypeculiar]

wow, that is v.cool. And I think I know what you mean, wmmc

How long's it been around?

[JudgeNutmeg]

''text mining for serendipitous discoveries ''

Sounds fab!

I love google scholar, it always lists holdings in googlebooks and I've had excellent marks for using contemporary info dredged up by the search engine thingymabob. Sometimes my uni portal is sooooo slow and the athens search so liable to log-out that I search google scholar first to refine my athens search. [/uber student]

[whomovedmychocolate]

It's been in the labs since before I gave up my proper job because I worked on the original project. That was ooooh 2005.

And in English - serendipitous discovery means making connections through luck but actually doing it using semantic language.

So let's say for example you are a medical researcher working in the field of sudden heart failure. If you read all the medical literature you'll know what other folks are researching and you may have hunches of your own, but what if you could do reverse searches on any subject - not just medicine. Things like for example, cookery or burial rituals etc. Random things.

Let's imagine there is a tribe in Africa that never had sudden heart failure, and then by tracking back through all the books in the world (and all the papers etc) you could find out that it's because the tribesmen eat a certain berry and that the berry has a chemical in it that can eradicate the disease?

Now, that's where it gets cool (and profitable).

A more common example is the use by the US DoD where they used text mining to analyse ownership as well as content of websites and to find that a certain terrorist group were actually funding the creation of school websites for children as young as four in order to indoctrinate them.

Or the connections between kiddy porn and drugs.

The whole thing is fascinating.

[whomovedmychocolate]

Google scholar and Google books should work together quite well btw.

[/ubergeek on a pension]

[JudgeNutmeg]

I went to Nice for my 10th wedding anniversary and shared a hotel with a massive Google convention. Those geeks know how to Paaartay.

[whomovedmychocolate]

Yeah, they don't get out much