Academic

Paperless to Papered Up

By Rob Heverly

It seems the pendulum is swinging back from computers helping us go "paperless" to computers helping us make physical copies of the written word. As Amy Landers notes over at PrawfsBlawg, lots and lots of really good books are available in downloadable, free, scanned versions from Google Books:

After running a Google book search, I found a familiar list of links to dealers along the left side of the page, where the book might be purchased.  This time, and for the first time in my experience, I found an additional link which allowed me to download the entire book in PDF format.  All 578 pages, just as they would appear in a paper form.  Right there, right now.

Now Amy can print the book if she wants to (I would, screen reading doesn't agree with my old-fashioned eyes), put it in a three-ring-binder, and have it for all time. You can also download Google books, and if you have the full Adobe Acrobat software (or perhaps even ghostscript or another PDF utility), extract pages, re-order them, save the compiled version, and distribute them to students for reading (the most recent books I used in this way were Proudhon's "What is Property" and Marx's "Capital" -- any guesses what topics I'm covering in Property Theory next week?).

But there is another option for turning the written scanned word back into "real" print. It follows from Google's agreement to team up with "On Demand Books" to provide for printing of out of copyright books (and perhaps out of print "orphan" books if the Settlement goes through in some form or another). With On Demand's "Espresso" book printing machine, you can print out a copy of a book from Google's collection of more than two million scanned out of copyright books. The machine prints and binds a book of 300 pages in about four minutes. Suggested retail price is $8 (with $1 going to On Demand and $1 going to Google, which has said it will donate its share to charity).

This means that books that have been taking up no space on new shelves for a long time can now once again take up space on shelves.  (via Slashdot)

There are other options for moving from online to print, as well. Blog2PDF allows you to print a book from your blog (or a blog where you have posting permissions). Since my login was created for my guest stint here on the Lounge, we've published 442 pages worth of posts (without comments!!). The books have covers (you can customize) as well as a table of contents. In addition to being able to order a copy of the book for $163.35, you can buy a version for download (for $7.95). I wonder if Dan could make a book from all of the posts since the Lounge opened, get the $7.95 download version (I'm only guessing that the download price stays the same regardless of length), then release it to the public domain, provide a copy to the Google book project, and then print it on an Espresso machine for $8.00 more. (via The Reference Frame)

In any event, I'm off to download the book Amy wrote about (Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science). And I'll probably print it and put it in a three-ring-binder on Monday.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 18, 2009 (boomark / email).