Google ebooks > everything else

[TimW]

Originally Posted by Ditchleyportrait

ah ha! all is well my hearties! i got the thing to go through. carl carmer here i come! yeah yay!

all i have to do is convert the epub to kindle format with calibre.

kovid rocks!

You must be viewing a different copy of "The Hudson" than I found. The only Google copy I found was a rough scanned copy, not an ePub. It's not meant for small screens although it may be okay on a DX. Is this it?

http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=JYx4ptmVQ7cC&as_brr=5

Personally, I wouldn't pay $12.96 for a copy of that quality but I hope you like it.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Ditchleyportrait

well two books, but yeah i get what you're saying. i feel like google has the "important" books in fiction that amazon has, but they also have many obscure but equally valid non-fiction titles amazon doesn't

Also, consider the quality of the books. Most of the google ones look like crap. Most of the ones I've seen, the text from the OCR is often incomprehensible, and the layout and formatting is atrocious. That kinda leaves the images from the PDF version, which do not scale well.

[Arrghus]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Also, consider the quality of the books. Most of the google ones look like crap. Most of the ones I've seen, the text from the OCR is often incomprehensible, and the layout and formatting is atrocious. That kinda leaves the images from the PDF version, which do not scale well.

Can't agree more with you. I stopped downloading public domain eBooks from Google after trying to read one I'd put on my device. Typos and invalid characters everywhere.

Luckily I found MobileRead and a bunch of great people dedicated to correcting such sloppiness!

[HighRoadToTibet]

I feel it's a bit early to tell what Google's ebook service will be like but whenever Google enters a market, they do tend to dominate it. I'll just wait and see for a while....

[queentess]

Originally Posted by HighRoadToTibet

I feel it's a bit early to tell what Google's ebook service will be like but whenever Google enters a market, they do tend to dominate it. I'll just wait and see for a while....

Yeah, Wave really worked out well for me. And Google Docs just crushes Excel.

Google has it's place, and I generally like it's products, but I would hardly say it dominates any market it enters.

[HarryT]

Google Books currently only operates in the US, so it's of no relevance for most of us.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Google Books currently only operates in the US, so it's of no relevance for most of us.

I'm not sure it's relevant to anyone in the US (yet) either.

I see it more as a Noah's Ark of ebooks. A noble cause that scans books for historical purposes. Not as a place to buy readable books that are formatted for my reader. But maybe they'll change my mind someday.

[pidgeon92]

ewwwww... I'd have to be pretty desperate to read the book to buy this file....

[OneandonlyDoc]

A lot of what's on Google Books is still leftover from the day when they in part tapped into the library system in the US and Canada as well as the system at archive.org to make rare books available to scholars as part of their Google Scholar initiative. That means there's a lot of volunteer page scans and such of rarer or out of print books available through Google Books not available in other places. I imagine that while some of the books are out of print, they're not out of copyright and thus the prices are being set by publishers and/or the copyright holders.

There's been a HUGE legal tangle about all of this stuff for the past couple years, so what we're seeing with some of the pricing may well be a result of that. This said, a lot of what's available through Google Books can be a godsend if you're a researcher working on obscure subjects. When I was writing my Master's thesis, I was able to find several obscure collections of primary documents dating to the early 20th century that were amazing in the context of my work.

So it at least has a few advantages over Amazon.

[HarryT]

I've made extensive use of Google's page scans when proof-reading books; they're a fantastic resource for that. What I'm questioning is their relevance as a commercial bookseller.

[OneandonlyDoc]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've made extensive use of Google's page scans when proof-reading books; they're a fantastic resource for that. What I'm questioning is their relevance as a commercial bookseller.

I guess time'll tell on that count, right? They did already release their new reader, though I'll admit that I wonder if it's too late. Either way, for a company like Google, it's more "nothing ventured, nothing gained" and they can probably afford to have this fall flat on its face, if that's what it comes to.

[Ditchleyportrait]

Originally Posted by TimW

You must be viewing a different copy of "The Hudson" than I found. The only Google copy I found was a rough scanned copy, not an ePub. It's not meant for small screens although it may be okay on a DX. Is this it?

http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=JYx4ptmVQ7cC&as_brr=5

Personally, I wouldn't pay $12.96 for a copy of that quality but I hope you like it.

Yes, that's the one. It's surprisingly perfect. There are no errors or anything like that. The quality is like any other ebook. Yes, I'm reading it on the Kindle DX. I don't know if that would matter, though.

[Ditchleyportrait]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Also, consider the quality of the books. Most of the google ones look like crap. Most of the ones I've seen, the text from the OCR is often incomprehensible, and the layout and formatting is atrocious. That kinda leaves the images from the PDF version, which do not scale well.

Google does account for some errors in their books. I had one with very minor errors because of OCR. I believe the lowercase e with accent was accidentally rendered as a 3. Didn't bother me. In contrast, the same book uploaded to archive by an institution other than google, was absolutely riddled with errors and unreadable.

This one I've paid for is perfect, and the illustrations render well. I'm happy.

[=X=]

Google's OCR has gotten REALLY good. I remember a few years back it was hard to find a book w/o errors. Now it's hard to find a book with errors and if there are errors you can revert back to the original PDF.

=X=

[Ditchleyportrait]

Originally Posted by TimW

You must be viewing a different copy of "The Hudson" than I found. The only Google copy I found was a rough scanned copy, not an ePub. It's not meant for small screens although it may be okay on a DX. Is this it?

http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=JYx4ptmVQ7cC&as_brr=5

Personally, I wouldn't pay $12.96 for a copy of that quality but I hope you like it.

it's available in epub and pdf.

i downloaded the epub.