Luddites Beware!

Have any friends who keep telling you that you can’t find everything you need on the internet? That real information is still kept in things called books? Tell those friends to shut up. No really, they need to shut up.

Google Books has scanned every page of every book from the New York Public Library, the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford and compiled them into their Google Book Search, formerly called Google Print.

Now when you search for “Jane Austen,” you won’t just get results based on a few college students who have posted their term papers on familial tensions in Pride and Prejudice, but you’ll get their bibliographical sources, too.

Book results will display your search request in the context of the books, with a few pages to get you hooked. If the book is copyrighted material, you will have to go to the library or a bookstore to read the whole thing. Books that have fallen into the public domain, or books whose publishers have waived copyright, can be read from cover to cover.

A few tips for searching Google Books:

Full-text only

Do you want to only search for books that you can see from first page to last? Right under the search window on Google Books, you can check either “All Books” (default) or “Full Text Books.”

Search by author

So you want to find all the plays and poems of Williams Shakespeare? Searching Google Books for “inauthor:Shakespeare” will limit the results to just that. If you need to search for both first and last name of an author, like Raymond Chandler, your search should look like this: “inauthor:Raymond inauthor:Chandler”

Search by title

There’s been so much written about gardening, so how do you narrow your search to your topic of interest? Try “intitle:orchid”

Search by date

Only interested in books published in the nineteenth century about cotton? Try “cotton date:1800-1900”

Google Scholar

Go even deeper with Google Scholar, which searches peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations—most notably the JSTOR archive, a digital database of over 800 scholarly journals, covering arts, business, science, and math.

Google Scholar will let you see glimpses of your JSTOR results, but like Google Books, you’ll need to go to a library with a JSTOR subscription to get the full text of the articles Google Scholar found for you.

Click EasyEdit to add your own tips for scouring Google Books and Google Scholar.


See also:

• Froogle
• Fun With Google
• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups

• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Search Tips
• Google Zeitgeist
• Image Search
• Your Website and Google