It’s hardly a secret that many of us here at Team ProfHacker are lovers of All Things Google. We’ve written numerous posts about several Google services. One that I’ve come to appreciate a great deal is Google Books.
Why?
First, it’s very handy for searching for a quote in a particular book when you know it’s there but can’t find it (though, annoyingly, you can remember that it was on the left-hand page, and about two-thirds of the way down, that memory’s of little use when you’re dealing with a 400-page book).
What else can you do with Google Books?
Well, at minimum, you should be able to pull publication information into your Zotero library. That will be the case even if there’s no preview at all available for the book. But if there is a preview, you may be in luck.
We’ve all had it happen. There’s a book we need, and our library doesn’t have it. Nor do any neighboring libraries. Interlibrary loan’s (ILL) certainly a possibility, but it isn’t always fast enough; we may need the book sooner than ILL can get it to us. If we really need the entire book, Google Books won’t be much help. But often we only need a portion of a book. If that portion is in the preview, we’re in luck. We can still get the information we need even if we can’t get our hands on a physical copy of the book. (I’m assuming that, in citing something from a Google Book preview, one would treat it as a hard copy and reference the edition from which the preview was taken—if anyone knows whether any of the major style manuals have yet commented on a case like this, please let us know in the comments.)
A caveat
There are, of course, some dangers. For copyright reasons, Google leaves pages out of previews, and sometimes the omitted pages are right in the middle of a chapter or section. That raises the potential for missing the context of whatever material one is citing, so caution is certainly in order. And sometimes, one of the omitted pages is precisely one of the ones you need. In that case, there’s no getting around it. You’re just going to have to put the project on hold until you can obtain a full copy of the work, or else decide you don’t really need that particular source after all.
If the book is in the public domain, of course, you can read it in its entirety (though if you’re a Nook owner your eyes will probably thank you if you read it there rather than on your computer screen).
I’ll readily admit that making use of a Google Book preview is a second-best option. Whenever possible, it’s best to have an actual copy of the full book (whether a paper or an electronic edition). But when circumstances make that impossible, Google Books can be of great help.
What uses have you found for Google Books? Let’s hear from you in the comments.
[Image by Flickr user cavenderamy / Creative Commons licensed]
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15 Responses to Simple, Powerful Uses for Google Books
sselisker - August 13, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I’ve used Google Books in my teaching in order to give students access to first (or early) editions of books that are out of copyright, or for pulling illustrations from older editions. (I used Joel Chandler Harris’ “Uncle Remus” tales, with illustrations when teaching Charles Chesnutt.) Seeing early editions can also Having begun to use the Kindle more and more for academic reading (a few U P’s are finally beginning to offer scholarly books), I’m now able to highlight and annotate important text, import it into my research database (Scrivener), and, when I want to cite it, search for the text in Google Books. This is a nice way around the problem, on Kindle, of going without page numbers in the text.I should note, too, that when you’re looking for a citation and Google Books says something you want is “not part of the preview,” the Amazon Search Inside feature tends to have fewer limitations of that sort. With a combination of Google Books and Amazon Search Inside, one can open up lots of text-searching possibilities in books that aren’t available on, say, Project Gutenberg. My friend Chris Forster has done really neat things doing powerful text searches on PG (see http://www.cforster.com/2010/01/mining-obscenity-iii-failure-with-visualizations/), and the possibility of a Google Books API being used in a similar way is exciting indeed.
phdeviate - August 13, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I started writing a comment to this post, but I realized that it was such an anecdote that it should be its own post. It’s a story about how google books saved me, sortof, from a digital research nightmare in the woods.
phdeviate - August 13, 2010 at 1:12 pm
@sselisker My story is somewhat about the kindle-google books interaction. I think this interaction speaks well of google books, but badly of kindle. No pagination? What’s that about!?
acavender - August 13, 2010 at 2:17 pm
@sselisker and @phdeviate Thanks for the comments! I have to admit I’d forgotten about Amazon Search Inside. I’ll have to remember that tip.@phdeviate Great story! I’m glad you were able to find the citations you were looking for.
rgilmour - August 13, 2010 at 2:28 pm
APA style requires that online books be indicated as such. An example from the manual:Shotton, M. A. (1989). Computer addiction? A study of computer dependency [DX Reader version]. Retrieved from http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/html/index.aspPersonally, I would be inclined to add publication information about the original, for example:White, G. (1908). The natural history of Selborne. London, U.K.: Cassell. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=b8UYAAAAYAAJIf referring to a text that is available only as a preview, I would include that in brackets:Sklar, D. (2004). Learning PHP 5 [Google books preview]. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=r0RzbTtX1VsCStyle manuals are open to interpretation, so this is just my opinion as a librarian. I’m not from the APA.See also this entry from the APA Style Blog: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html
acavender - August 13, 2010 at 2:54 pm
@rgilmour Thanks!
phdeviate - August 13, 2010 at 3:02 pm
@rgilmour–The only times I’ve used electronic books are when I’ve have also had the paper copies available, thus I have checked my citation against the paper book before submitting. I’m glad that citations are catching up with electronic versions, but given the option (and the availability of a paper version) the citation styles for paper books are still much, much simpler. For journal articles, I find them pretty comparable.
11159995 - August 13, 2010 at 6:03 pm
“I should note, too, that when you’re looking for a citation and Google Books says something you want is “not part of the preview,” the Amazon Search Inside feature tends to have fewer limitations of that sort.” The reason this is the case is that Google operates under licenses from publishers whereas Amazon was brazen enough to tell publishers that its “Search Inside” feature was just “fair use.” Google was sued for its library digitization project, which it claimed to be fair use. Too bad no one stepped up to the plate to sue Amazon. Just another example of Amazon’s heavy-handed methods in dealing with publishers.—Sandy Thatcher
philosophy - August 13, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Barnes & Noble also has the Search Inside feature. Sometimes I’ve found B&N better than Amazon or Google, sometimes not. I start with Google and if that’s unsatisfactory then switch to Amazon or B&N.Pagination. Occasionally when the page #s are given, they are inaccurate by one or two pages. I had a Faulkner novel (The Unvanquished) and couldn’t remember or find where “equinox” appeared. Amazon found it, but the pages were wrong by two, probably because the first page of the first chapter is numbered 3 in the book, but Amazon’s scanning began with that page and considered it to be page 1! Google got it right.
cosmosis - August 13, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Didn’t see this in the comments (or if it’s there and I missed it, I apologize for being redundant), but as much as I love Google Books for exactly the reasons Amy Cavender mentioned in this article, as an art historian it’s also good to know that even if the pages one needs are in preview, quite often any images contained in those preview pages will be blanked out, due to copyright issues.
phdeviate - August 14, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Another great save by Google Books! I’m revising an article for publication based on editor’s comments. The editor caught a grammatical error inside a quotation. As you might imagine, I initially wrote the piece quite some time ago, and the book containing the quotation in question is long since returned to the library. By searching the phrase within the google book, I was able to confirm that the grammatical error *is* in the original and thus include the (necessary?) sic.
jrlupton - August 16, 2010 at 9:35 am
If I have read the book “as a hard copy” and then reaccess it in Google Books to check quotes, verify publication information, etc., I don’t cite it as such in my bibliography.I also really like the “My Library” function. If I’ve used an online copy and found it helpful, I save it as a favorite. It’s easy to find again, and when I see the books all lined up there, it jogs my memory and reminds me to refer to some of these works again.
drjeff - August 16, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Sandy Thatcher: granted, Amazon telling the publishers rather than negotiating with them isn’t exactly playing nice, but what is the harm? Probably, I’m just ignorant of the issue here.”Search Inside” doesn’t seem to allow the viewer to see enough of the work to read too much of it, does it? I always thought that limiting the amount of the work that is “copied” was a (“the”?) central idea to fair use, so this doesn’t really seem inappropriate to me. What am I missing in this argument?
sbstillman - August 16, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Great ideas presented here, including the valuable APA tips. I think using Google books (and suggesting this option to students) is much preferred to using the (dreaded) secondary source. I have a hard time explaining to students that primary sources must be used when available. Google Books, while not the entire book, at least is a step in that direction. Thanks, also, for mentioning Zotero, which is a fabulous way to collect, annotate, and store references, share them, and much more.
jmutell - August 17, 2010 at 8:43 am
I’m catching up with ProfHacker as a break from my current project: Right now I’m working on a novel that’s out of print (The Position of Peggy Harper, by Leonard Merrick, 1911). It’s available in its entirety on Google Books. I set the book up on my laptop screen, Evernote on my netbook next to it, allowing me to read and take notes. This is a great novel and more people should know about it — lost forever if it weren’t for Google Books! An amazing resource AND a useful tool.