Google Book Search’s Better Features

I’ve made my opposition to Google’s plan to scan materials that are still covered by copyright and make them available on the Internet well known. I’ve ranted about it extensively here at length and won’t beat that poor dead horse any more.

At the same time, each time I’ve addressed this question, I’ve said that I think that the scanning of public domain works is not only appropriate but an admirable and worthy project that I wholeheartedly support, largely because nobody’s copyright rights are being trampled. After the past couple of weeks, I feel even more strongly about the subject.

When we decided to beef up our study of the retreat from Gettysburg to make it a more scholarly work than its original incarnation was, I spent a lot of time on the on-line book archive sites, searching for Union and Confederate regimental histories and published memoirs and the like. I own copies of virtually every published cavalry regimental history, but only a handful of infantry regimentals. Consequently, I hit the on-line archive sites hard.

I ended up downloading nearly 40 full books in the public domain in PDF form, burning them to a CD-ROM, and then bringing them into the office so I could print out the pertinent portions of them for use in the book. Wow….talk about some finds. Some of the material that I got that way is really remarkable stuff, in very rare regimental histories. I’m nearly done plugging this material into the manuscript, and let me tell you, it’s made a huge difference in the overall tactical detail and overall quality of the book. When it comes to the public domain materials, I am a true believer.

There are three different sites where one can find a lot of this good material in PDF form. First, of course, is the Google book search site. Enter your search command, and when the results come up, be sure to click on “full view”, which will provide access to the complete text of these public domain works.

I also made very extensive use of the Internet Archive site, which is really a portal that collects these scanned materials and provides access to them. The selection of available public domain materials on this site is much more extensive than Google’s. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about it until I was well into the process. I ended up using the Internet Archive more than any other resource.

The third major resource is the one I used the least. It’s in part because, as a Mac user, I have a pathological hatred of all things Microsoft, which I view as the Evil Empire. Given a choice between using a Microsoft product and ANYTHING else, I will almost always use the alternative (I use Eudora for e-mail at work because I hate Outlook, and I’m a long-time Firefox user, as just two examples). It’s also because the site is buggy and doesn’t always work smoothly, and it won’t work at all on a Mac. However, the Microsoft live book search site is a useful tool (if you can get it to work), as it provides a portal to pretty much all of the digitized material available in various repositories around the Internet. It was my last resort, used to make certain I hadn’t missed anything on the other sites.

There are some other sites with much smaller databases, but you can pretty much access them by using these three sites. Having access to all of those public domain regimental histories and memoirs in one place that was relatively easy to use made the task of accumulating and incorporating this material into the manuscript quickly and painlessly possible. Thus, while I remain intransigent in my opposition to Google’s attacks on my copyright rights, I remain a true believer in the value of making public domain materials readily available for use by the consuming public that might not otherwise have access to those materials.