Be Excellent To Each Other

Here is my favourite bit of one of my favourite books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=7kns2t ... &q&f=false

Google Books has whole books on it. That you can read. For free.

How's that allowed, then?

Because it's not the entire book.

What's the point, then?

If it's still fully searchable, if not totally readable without a fee, it's still useful. Would save a lot of long hours going through indexes if you're doing research. I found Google Scholar very handy as a student - the book search would have been very handy to, if only to save me the faff of locating a book, waiting three days for it to be dug up, only to find that it wasn't as useful for the work as I'd wanted it to be.

There was a massive faff about this a while back. I recall several of the authors I follow on Twitter being unsure about the whole thing, and rather wary of it in general.

Sometimes it is - it says if it's missing pages. The Hunger linked above is the whole book, for example.

Wow. Er, how are they getting away with this?

They have been sued multiple times, and have reached settlements with many publishers and authors.

At the moment authors can agree to have their entire work on the site, or to have a smaller amount, but with the entire book searchable. For this they are given money and a proportion of all ad revenue associated with that page.

But the majority of books on there aren't readable beyond snippets and searches.

More details at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

It isn't for me. Starts at pay 36. An have many sections missing.

What the fuck phone are you using, Dave? A Nokia 3210 with eight missing keys and broken predictive text?

Dave was replaced by Beexbot a while back. We're still tuning his grammar engine.

The website doesn't work properly, loads of text overlaying pictures of books; and the link doesn't seem to link a to a section of the book, just the description.

It's more the speed and use of vertical keyboard. Generally speaking I'll be writing this during a test run and so not have overly much time.

Ask Rick Astley how well that worked out for him.

Huh. I get the whole thing. See:

Some examples of what I get: (It's like this until page 123, when it misses the whole book bar the final page

Are you logged in, Dave? I believe it shows things differently for registered users.

To google? Aye.

I cant read any of the book if I click on link. I get a few reviews, a few links of how to buy the book and a note saying no preview available.

just viewed it at home and it vioews correctly now, but I get the same as Dave. Possibly for the best having read that excerpt.

What do you mean? "Oh, It looks like a bratwurst" is one of the classic lines in any book.

(Yes, it looks appalling)

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/bookcase

Cor.