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Google's Library Up and Running 420

Posted by Hemos from the good-news-for-the-information dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that Google Print results are beginning to appear on searches. For those who don't know, Google has been scanning from libraries from some of the world's greatest universities in order to compile a freely accessible online library. An easy way to turn up these results is to simply type "book", and then whatever you want to search for. For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise. 20,000 leagues, Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice and m o r e are all there in full. It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines. In the meantime, would anyone like to point out any good books?" Hopefully, Google can also start to index some books that are being released in the Creative Commons/alternative open licenses.
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Google's Library Up and Running More

Google's Library Up and Running

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  • Out of print (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:35AM (#11998487) Homepage Journal
    It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines. In the meantime, would anyone like to point out any good books?"

    Here is a hint that will help and not hurt the publishers. Put online out of print books. I would like to make the same argument for out of print music and movies and scientific journals as well which ironically, could hold huge profits for studios and publishing houses. After all, this is the ideal for long tail businesses, right? if these businesses could release for nominal fees all of the movies, music and books that have already paid for themselves, Google (or iTunes or iMovie or iPub or whatever) could serve as the front end which would allow for the finding of said information and then the publishing houses could make money on products that long ago had paid for themselves and created profits. This is almost like free (as in beer) money for them and low cost media for us.

    • Re:Out of print (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pbranes ( 565105 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:39AM (#11998528)
      Out of print books online is a great idea, but what I can't understand is why google doesn't have a page that just lists the books they have in full-text. They compare it to a bookstore, but in a bookstore you can see books you have never heard of. You can't do that with google's library because you can only search for books that you know.
      • Except for the tiny fact that the entire library is indexed, including all of those books you don't know exist.

        I agree though, it would be nice to have a browsable listing.

    • Re:Out of print (Score:5, Informative)

      by Total_Wimp ( 564548 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:13AM (#11998925)
      Out of print, copyrighted, whatever. This is how google has chosen to deal with the subject:

      Thank you for using Google Print.

      You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.

      Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.


      I had thought that they were putting "books" online. Turns out they're just putting the ability to search through books online.

      BTW, this came up when I hit next page too many times on "Origin of Species" who's original text, I presume, is not copyrighted.

      TW

      • Re:Out of print (Score:4, Informative)

        by Wiwi Jumbo ( 105640 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:26AM (#11999101) Homepage Journal
        I might be wrong about this, but I think that the copyright might be in relation to the text (appearing to) having been scanned from a book printed in 1996.

        For Google to offer it for free would mean that they'd have to scan it from a printed source which is also out of copyright??

        Well, I think that's the case....

        Anyone who says they fully understand copyright is either a fool or a liar... or worse. ;-)

        • Re:Out of print (Score:5, Informative)

          by ComputerSlicer23 ( 516509 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @11:14AM (#11999717)
          Project Gutenburg is a pretty good source for copyright info. Here's what he has to say:

          FAQ entry on books with updated copyright dates [gutenberg.org]

          So there you go.

          It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.

          Fun huh?.

          Kirby

          • Public Domain can't be copyrighted (Score:4, Informative)

            by dananderson ( 1880 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @12:30PM (#12000960) Homepage
            I work a lot with putting copyright materials online. See /http://yosemite.ca.us/history/ [yosemite.ca.us] I get a lot of resistience from librarians, but that's another story. Only original material can be copyrighted. For a reprinted book, for example, that would be new introductions or new art. It would not minor editing or line breaks. A federal court found that high-quality photographs of art do not have copyright protection. They were considered "slavish copies," without any additional creativity. Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, 1999 (S.D.N.Y. 1999).

            That said, it's always better to reproduce from an early printing, and not a new printing, to avoid any question of copyright.

      • Re:Out of print (Score:3, Informative)

        by micromoog ( 206608 )
        Project Gutenberg's got it in plain text [gutenberg.org], which is better in almost every way.

      • Re:Out of print (Score:3, Informative)

        by bcrowell ( 177657 )
        The issue isn't Google, it's the publisher. The editorial work that went into that particular edition of The Origin of Species is probably copyrighted.

        I have some of my own books [lightandmatter.com] going through the Google Print pipeline. Mine are copylefted, and in fact they're available as complete PDFs online, for free, so unlike many participating publishers, I didn't have any concerns about limiting access. In my Google Print account, I have a settings page that includes this:

        • Percent browsable [ edit ]

        • Google protects

  • textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TedCheshireAcad ( 311748 ) <ted.fc@rit@edu> on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:37AM (#11998511) Homepage
    It would be great if textbooks were on there. $120 is too much for a calculus book.
    • This is especially true since Calc 101 texts are essentially all the same except that the problem numbers are juggled around so that the students from one year can't resell their used books to the incoming group.
      I have found, though, that the quality of calculus tutorials on the web is quite good. If you are just looking to learn the subject rather than focusing on a specific textbook there are plenty of resources out there.
    • There is no need for the outragous fees charged undergraduate students for the first half of engineering and science programs. Physics at the undergraduate level does not change much. I learned the same calculus my father did 30 years previous to I.

      Ditto statics and mechanics. Ditto introductory chemistry. Ditto analytical geometery. Ditto, ditto, ditto.

      One can make all sorts of conspiracy theories as to why students need these texts foisted upon them.

      Wikibooks has a lot of promise for a top notch open-s

    • Re:textbooks (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Silver Sloth ( 770927 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:01AM (#11998785)

      I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular viewpoint and may get modded flamebait but I've seen the other side of achedemic publishing.

      The problem with pricing on text books is the very limited market. Even if Proffessor Plum sells a copy to every student on his course he will only sell ~100 per year. Compare and contrast with the thousends of copies sold of the average novel. Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas. All these force the price up.

      Just because students are poor(ish) doesn't mean that they can be excempt from market forces.

      • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Informative)

        by Roger_Wilco ( 138600 )

        Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas.

        That's why most textbooks nowadays are formatted using LaTeX [latex-project.org]. Besides, most printing houses for textbooks require camera-ready, so it's the author's problem to get those wacky symbols onto paper.

      • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Insightful)

        by halber_mensch ( 851834 )
        As already mentioned, typesetting isn't an issue since we have electronic typesetting with LaTeX, roff, etc. The brand-new-off-the-shelf price is extreme because
        a) the Ph.D. that wrote the sucker wants his big fat check for his doctorate status - he didn't earn three degrees and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to rake in a measley 22 grand a year
        b) the publishing company wants their share of the big fat check because that's what they do
        c) the campus bookstore and other textbook dealers know that

      • Re:textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:28AM (#11999136) Journal
        Here's a less popular viewpoint, at least amongst professors.

        Quit using your class to sell your textbook.

        Look, I don't care how many PhD's you have in Math, your personal Calculus textbook is no different than any other. In fact, you didn't even make any stunning breakthroughs in the field of undergraduate integration and derivation, so quit writing a new version every year!

        Students wouldn't have to pay $120 a textbook if the professors didn't want it to be that way.

        • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Interesting)

          by bcrowell ( 177657 )
          Quit using your class to sell your textbook.
          Stop and think for a second. How do you think any textbook gets written for the first time? Do you think the publisher has a bunch of mathematicians sitting in the basement, waiting to be ordered to write their next textbook? No, sorry, the only people who are competent to write a good textbook are people who are actually teaching the subject, and once they've written it, it needs to be tested on real students, just like software needs to be tested before it's r

          • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Informative)

            by ad0gg ( 594412 )
            $20 to $30 to print a book? You gotta to be kidding. 0.10 a cents page? For that price I could go down to Kinkos and color photocopy it for cheaper and thats more than 4 colors. Those textboxes are probably $5 to $7 to produce. At $130 retail price, the professor is probably taking half or $50. My freshman calc class probably had 500 people in it, and there were 3 classes a day. 1500 students a semester, 3000 a year. $150,000 a year. Not bad for changing the questions every other year, so people ha

            • Re:textbooks (Score:4, Interesting)

              by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @03:10PM (#12003186) Homepage
              At $130 retail price, the professor is probably taking half or $50.
              A typical royalty is about 10 [textbookpublisher.com] to 12 [weber.edu] percent of "net" (i.e., wholesale), which works out to be about 7.5-9% of retail, not 38%, as you seem to be assuming.

              and thats more than 4 colors.
              "Four colors" refers to the number of colors of ink, not the number of colors that can be produced by mixing them, which is theoretically infinite.

              $20 to $30 to print a book? You gotta to be kidding. 0.10 a cents page?
              The textbooks that are $130 typically have a page count of about 1000-1100 pages, rather than the 200-300 pages you seem to be assuming. The ppb (paper, printing, and binding) cost for black and white upper division physics textbooks is typically about 3 dollars [weber.edu]. Four-color printing costs four times more than one color, and the $130 color undergrad textbooks are typically about twice the page count of a graduate text, so 3x4x2 gives about $24. The price is really a setup cost; once you've got the press running, the cost to make one more copy is very small. This is all going to depend a lot on the length of the press run.

      • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Slack3r78 ( 596506 )
        And my retort is this: Why does every professor feel the need to write and publish their own textbook? It's not the dificulty about it so much as the ridiculous duplication of effort that annoys me so much about it. While there are exceptions to any rule, some of the *worst* textbooks I've ever used were written by the course's instructor.

        So yes, writing textbooks is hard work and deserves compensation, but every professor writing their own textbook that all have the same information and requiring *THAT* t

        • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Insightful)

          by TGK ( 262438 )
          Three words "publish or perish"

          If the professor can get someone to publish his textbook, even if it has to sell at $300 a copy to post a profit, he gets to toss another publication on his resume.

          If he's tenure track, he needs those publications for job security.

          Further, lots of profs are aware that, if they write the text book they don't have to worry about changes in the course materials. Any new versions they put out (no matter how minor the changes) are versions they control. Thus, no being blindsid

      • Re:textbooks (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ibanez ( 37490 )
        I can order on from Amazon UK and have the books shipped over here, still only paying half the price of the same book over here.

        Its price gouging plain and simple.

  • one cliche, one other (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) <yayaguNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:37AM (#11998514) Journal

    I know this is cliche, but Grapes of Wrath is a classic, and one of my alltime favorites. I've read it four or five times, and it gets better each read. Yeah, it's always in the "list", but it deserves to be.

    Another favorite of mine is more related to what /.-ers are about. Read Player Piano by Vonnegut. It's not his most well know work, but it is, I think, maybe one of his best, certainly one of his most perceptive. Just my $.02.

  • Highlighting is annoyuing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:40AM (#11998537) Journal
    So once you've got "Origin of Species" up on the screen, how do you prevent it from highlighting every occurrence of the words "Origin", "of" and "species" in yellow? It's very annoying.

  • popular public domain classics are already online (Score:5, Informative)

    by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:40AM (#11998540) Homepage
    A lot of these books have been available online (and easily findable via search engines) for years, courtesy of Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] and others. Granted, Google gives them a little higher profile, and maybe they'll be more accessible, but it's not like the publishers of Shakespeare and Stevenson are facing something really new here.

    • it's not like the publishers of Shakespeare and Stevenson are facing something really new here.

      Yup. Go to your local bookstore and look up any of those. You'll find multiple editions from multiple publishers, some who specialize in just selling the most book for the least price, some that differentiate themselves with extra introductions or annotations or whatever (and they do have copyright on those extras). This is all good, and it's been going on for ever.

      --Bruce Fields

  • Copyrighted material? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sisukapalli1 ( 471175 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:40AM (#11998544)
    I clicked on Pride and Prejudice -- the page is an image (dynamically generated with search phrases highlighted). My gripes: (1) context menus are disabled (so, may be difficult to save the image from the page), and (2) there is a big "copyrighted material" sign on the side. In my opinion, they should have scanned the public domain version of the novel -- like what Gutenberg does...

    S

    • Get around context menus (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DoorFrame ( 22108 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:10AM (#11998894) Homepage
      You can get around the disabled context menus, but it involves a little bit of sifting through the html. For example this [google.com] is a page from 20,000 Leagues under the sea. Google set the background as the image you want to see, and placed a clear gif file above that, so when you click on view image, you just see the clear gif. Anyway, they didn't do anything too sneaky to hide the original image, it's just annoying.

      What happened to "don't be evil"?

  • Holy copyright imbroglio! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:41AM (#11998552)
    From the Harvard FAQ at: http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html [harvard.edu]...

    Will this include books still in copyright? Google will be scanning books that are in as well as out of copyright from the Harvard collections. Harvard-owned books in the public domain will be available in the search results. Google may choose to display descriptive catalog information for books that are still under copyright. We believe that Google's treatment of in-copyright works is consistent with copyright law.

    If I'm reading this correctly, that Google is placing the text of copyrighted works into a freely searchable and viewable database, it's an amazingly brazen step. It's also incredibly useful, but I can't imagine book publishers lying down for this. Add to this Disney's propensity for lobbying for extending copyrights everytime Mickey Mouse comes up for entering the public domain and I think we're headed for an interesting copyright showdown.
    • f I'm reading this correctly, that Google is placing the text of copyrighted works into a freely searchable and viewable database

      You are only half-correct. While they the database is freely searchable, you can't (fully) view the texts of copyrighted works -- you are only given access to a few pages of a given book.

  • Holy Bible? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by OAB_X ( 818333 )
    Surprisingly enough, they have not scanned the Holy Bible yet. You think with it being the #1 best selling book of al time they would have, but I guess not.

    Holy Bible missing [google.com]
    • Surprisingly enough, they have not scanned the Holy Bible yet. You think with it being the #1 best selling book of al time they would have, but I guess not.

      That's probably the reason they don't bother - everyone has it. Besides, lots of people have put the bible on internet, you can't say the same with another books

    • Re:Holy Bible? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:47AM (#11998631)
      Probably because it isn't just called the Holy Bible in the collection.

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=book+King +James&btnG=Search [google.com]

      However, I'm pretty sure you were just trolling.... Otherwise you would look for a specific VERSION of the bible!

      • Re:Holy Bible? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Total_Wimp ( 564548 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:02AM (#11998794)
        Thanks for the info, but he wan't trolling. It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either. It's a little surprising to have to be so specific for this particular book.

        TW

        • Re:Holy Bible? (Score:4, Funny)

          by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @11:06AM (#11999612)

          It was one of the first books I checked for and amazingly "bible" and "the bible" do not yeild the desired results either.

          That's what Christians get for naming their authoritative religious work "The Bible." All of you looking to start a new religion take note. Bad titles for your religious text include: The Book, The Writing, The Text, and The Bound Stack of Paper.

          P.S. The number of older texts that include the word "bible" is similar to the number of contemporary works that include the word "book."

    • Re:Holy Bible? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Stonehand ( 71085 )
      Try 'book king james version'. There's an 'Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha Bible'. Why that specific version, and not another?

      *shrug* Google might know.

  • what full text??? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wes33 ( 698200 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:43AM (#11998581)
    when I clicked the link for "origin of species" the google-book results are links to books you can **buy** with a small number of sample pages to look at.

    After the google-books results, you get the ordinary google results, some of which *do* link to online texts.

    To find Darwin's book on line to read, rather than buy, just use regular google. Book search seems to be just a commercial venture.

    Or am I missing something?

    • To find Darwin's book on line to read, rather than buy, just use regular google. Book search seems to be just a commercial venture.

      Or am I missing something?

      Yes, you're missing something. Google's book feature is not at all aimed at finding you full text books to read. It's designed to add the knowledge stored in book form to Google's search. And, conversely, to add the power of Google's search to books. That's why they're putting copyrighted works up. And that's why publishers can't get too peeved about

  • I'm not able to see more than a few pages of each of the books linked in the article. Am I missing something?

  • No Right Click (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Luke Psywalker ( 869266 )

    {if (event.button == 2) return false;}

    The source is ugly too. Would be nice if it was xml.

  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I just browsed around and these books are not actually "available" to read in full. The only pages you can get at are those with matches to your search. You can't just choose to go to page 1, and click "next page" until you get to the end of the book. If you want to actually read these books in full, try something like http://www.online-literature.com/ [online-literature.com]

  • not Full-Text! (Score:5, Informative)

    by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) * on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:46AM (#11998611) Homepage Journal
    Not one of the linked titles contains the full text of the book! Each shows only a few pages.
    From the "About Google Print" page:

    (you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the titles bibliographic data and brief snippets)

    However, it seems to consider every title to be "under copyright". I mean, Romeo and Juliet is centuries old, and surely in the public domain. If it's considered copyrighted, then just about everything will be.

    Anyway, if you want free e-texts, Project Gutenberg [gutenberg.org] is a great resource.
    • However, it seems to consider every title to be "under copyright". I mean, Romeo and Juliet is centuries old, and surely in the public domain. If it's considered copyrighted, then just about everything will be.

      So what if they aren't distributing them, didn't google committ copyright infringement just by copying all those materials? I'm not sure that scanning entire libraries falls under fair use.

  • The first thing that would come to mind would be a storm of lawsuits from publishers, worried about losing their core business. MP3 sharing and Music Companies come to mind.

    But then, this article [librarylaw.com] is more re-assuring.

    It seems the publishing industry is behaving more sanely than the music industry. Technology is progressing, and change is inevitable. Its better that we accept it. But then again, sharing music could be more detrimental to CD sales, than viewing text on a computer screen would be to book sale

    • It seems the publishing industry is behaving more sanely than the music industry. Technology is progressing, and change is inevitable. Its better that we accept it. But then again, sharing music could be more detrimental to CD sales, than viewing text on a computer screen would be to book sales.

      The book industry is not trying to support an obsolete business model; people still want physical books, while most would be content with (legal) downloaded music. Also, I guess most people in the book industry actu

  • No copyright infringement... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:47AM (#11998624)
    If you go to Google and read about this project, you'll quickly notice that unless the books are in the public domain, you won't be able to read the entire book online. This purpose of the project is the enable people to quickly _find_ books, not read them entirely online. Once you've found a desired book by using Google, you'll most likely have to go to a library and check the book out or buy it...

  • Oliver Twist is copyrighted? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WareW01f ( 18905 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:48AM (#11998640)
    Last I checked Oliver Twist [gutenberg.org] was written by Charles Dickens [wikipedia.org] whose been dead for over 125 years. I was sure this fell under public domain, but I could be wrong.

    Makes you wonder. At some point here there's going to start to be battles over who owns the rights to sections of the bible! Where will it end? (might clean up the 10 commandments issues as a simple copyright infringment. :)
    • The text is not copyrighted... but when someone takes a public domain text and publishes it, the resulting book IS copyrighted. If you scan that version, you are showing copyrighted material even if the contents aren't. You either have to reset the text yourself, or you have to find a book that was published long enough ago that the book itself is out of copyright.

      Ages ago a friend of mine had a VERY old book of mechanical line drawings (nearly 100 years old). We planned for a while to scan all of them and
  • Seems like a nice system, but why on earth are they serving the books as images rater then text if they've OCR'd them all?

    Of course I'm pretty sure the answer is to try and stop people copying the books (I see they've pulled out all the stops on the actual page to prevent people getting at the image files too).

    Surely it would be much more useful to have the books in text format though.
  • "It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines."

    Check out Baen Boooks, at , and take the link to the free library. Putting books on line has helped Baen's sales, not hurt them. Every time thety put a new book on line in the free librasry, sales of that author's books increas - even sales of the book that is available for free. [baen.com]

    Baen put a CD into a hardcover book with all the rest of the books in that series on it. Sales increased.

  • *if* (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ecotax ( 303198 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:49AM (#11998653)
    It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines.

    That's a very big if indeed - I wouldn't want to read a 300-page book from screen if it's still available in print.
    The decrease in sales to people who would (will) do so, could very well be compensated by the increase in sales from people who wouldn't have known about a certain book otherwise.
  • Hmm, just looked up 20,000 leagues and it only gives you the front and back cover, as well as the table of contents and the "if you found this book without a cover" notice... Can't seem to get any further into the book. Are you supposed to be able to read the books online or is it just for phrase referencing?

    -m
  • Unfortunately, the search which yields Darwin's (decidedly not controversial, at least among biologists) Origin of Species claims that it is still covered under copyright. While that may be true of the edition that they used as source material, it is decidedly not true of the original work itself, which is available from a wide number of places like Project Gutengerg [upenn.edu].

  • Plain Text Please (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DoorFrame ( 22108 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:05AM (#11998825) Homepage
    I don't really see the utility of this besides the ability to search within a book. First of all, you don't get a plain text version, so I can't download it and read it offline. Secondly, most of these books are already covered by Project Guttenburg which does provide plain text versions that you can download to a PDA and read at your leisure.

    Now, I readily admit I'm one of the few people who enjoys reading books off a PDA, but even I hate reading books on a regular computer screen. I don't think there's many people who will sit down and read long treatises this way. I could be wrong, but it seems unlikely.

    Also, the system doesn't seem to let you jump quickly and easily within a book. There's no "Go to page X" ability, you can only move slowly forward and backward from a handful of starting positions.

    This just doesn't seem very helpful (again, except if you're looking for a quote within a book and you want to search for it... this while be great for that).

  • Controversial? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by northcat ( 827059 )
    Charles Darwin's controversial treatise.

    How is it controversial? Not all of us live in USA, you know.
  • The Book of the Damned [google.com] by Charles Fort.

  • "The origin of species" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zayin ( 91850 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:09AM (#11998886)

    For instance, book origin of species will turn up the full text of Charles Darwin's controversial treatise.

    I think it's sad that "The origin of species" is referred to as controversial. What's next, Newton's "Principia Mathematica" considered controversial?

  • The Machine Stops [uiuc.edu] by E.M. Forster

  • Controversial? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:12AM (#11998922) Homepage
    In most parts of the world, Origin of Species hasn't been controversial for well over a century.

    • Re:Controversial? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by David Leppik ( 158017 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @12:18PM (#12000770) Homepage
      In most parts of the world, Origin of Species hasn't been controversial for well over a century.
      That's mainly because 2/3 of the world is covered in ocean, and the giant squid don't read. Seriously, how do you define "most parts of the world?" By population? By area? By number of countries, with EU members counted separately?

      The way I see it, there isn't a "most of the world" with a reliable split. The best I can do is to split it as follows:

      • The United States, which is divided between religious fundamentalism and a more secular world view. In large part, this is a rural/urban split, with the suburbs as the current battleground.
      • Western Europe, Canada and Australia, strongly in the secular camp.
      • Mexico, Central America, and South America; former European colonies, which have a variety of conservative Christian belefs (frequently Catholic), often merged with indigenous beliefs. On topics such as gay marriage, they are strongly conservative.
      • Africa, former European colonie and home to countless Christian and Moslem missionaries over the years. Like most of the Americas, lots of conservative Christianity, often mixed with indigenous beliefs. But with more Moslems.
      • The Middle East. Very Moslem, very conservative.
      • Southeast Asia. Lots of Buddhists, relatively little Christianity. Beyond that, as far as I can tell every country is distinct. Some have lots of Moslems. Some are secular, others less so.
      • Eastern Europe. Mostly secular from what I know, but every country is different.
      • Other. This isn't a complete list, but it gets at most of the populated parts of the world.

      Depending on how you want to weight each region, you might find that Origin is controversial to most of the world, or you might not.

      • Re:Controversial? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by northcat ( 827059 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @03:51PM (#12003664) Journal
        Nice list of all the countries mentioned on American TV channels there. And nice way of giving a separate entry for USA. You forgot India and China, the two biggest fucking countries in the world. I live in India and evolution is not controversial here. We learn evolution in our text books and we accept it. And the same case in China. And most other countries. We (non-US people) have different places for religious documents and scientific facts. We use religious documents for religious ceromonies/festivals etc., and we use science for everything else. (You're only giving reasons for why it's *possible* for evolution to be controversial outside USA. You're not giving any proof for that.) Only in USA do people take a religious document literally and try to put it over science and justify it using science. That's what we mean when we say evolution is not controversial outside USA - we don't reject evolution saying that it contradicts our religious documents. And we don't have such a huge group of people so vigorously working for the acceptance of some non-scientific crackpot theory over evolution. So when you call evolution controversial, either admit that it's only controversial in USA or go out of your mom's basement and look around - the world is not what it seems like on TV and over the Internet. Not all countries are like USA.

  • Hacking Google Print (Score:4, Interesting)

    by un1xl0ser ( 575642 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:16AM (#11998973)
    There is an interesting k5 article caled Hacking Google Print [kuro5hin.org].
    Check it out.

  • Defeating the pseudo-DRM (Score:5, Informative)

    by Andrew Cady ( 115471 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:20AM (#11999021)
    Hacking Google Print [kuro5hin.org] article on kuro5hin.org, explains how Google Print uses cookies to track your access and ensure you don't look at too many pages. Solution: acquire lots of cookies.
    Firefox GreaseMonkey scripts [dunck.us] -- scroll to "Google Butler"; it will make saving Google Print pages work without extra effort in Firefox.

  • Cthulhu Networking Book Found (Score:3, Funny)

    by drkich ( 305460 ) <dkichline&gmail,com> on Monday March 21, 2005 @10:56AM (#11999503) Homepage
    Did a search for book cthulhu [google.com] and one of the books listed was this one [google.com]. Funniest networking book I have ever seen.

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