NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, October 2006

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Books in Bunches
by Bob and Joy Schwabach
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 3rd week September, 2006
Published with permission

Starting just a couple of weeks ago, Google made the full text of many books free online. You may have read about this some months ago when a number of stories were written about criticism and pending lawsuits from book publishers. (Whose ox is being gored here, etc.)

You can start by going to Books.Google.com . If you check off a box titled "Full view books" and then your search request, you get results that contain the full book. If you search on "Inferno," for example, you get the full text of Dante's "Inferno," in either Italian or English. You also get books about that book.

Often it's more fun to just go to the site and enter a search term without checking off "Full view." Then you get what they call "limited previews." If you type "love" as your search term, for example, you'll get a book of quotations, fables, meditations, etc., and even a book of "Cathy" cartoons. On another search, we learned that P.G. Wodehouse liked to act as if he were his main character, the hapless Bertie Wooster, when being interviewed by journalists.




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