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Download and print entire books at Google

googlebook.jpg
Google is offering free PDF downloads at Google Books, of those books in the public domain. You can then print them out.

You can download titles like Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays (see example here), Dante's Inferno and Carlyle's Samuel Johnson.

Downloaded books carry a watermark identifying Google as the PDF's origin. Perhaps a bone to publishers Google is trying to negotiate with, who will only get more nervous with this sort of printing capability.


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Comments

Note that these PDFs are image-only. That means you cannot search for text, nor can you copy/paste text from the book.

Less important, but still a nuisance, is the fact that since it is an image it will probably take much longer to print and will likely use up extra toner.

Having the image is good for reference with no OCR errors, but without locally searchable text I fail to see the benefit of Google providing this as PDF. They should have used the PDF structure that displays the image, but that has the OCR text in a layer under the image. That would allow local searching (and ideally they'd also enable copy/paste).

RC on August 30, 2006 6:26 PM
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