September 17, 2007
Google My Library vs. LibraryThing
Via Library Thing’s blog, I discovered that LT had created a handy little bookmark that would let you search the contents of your books — provided they’d been scanned by Google.
I’d been more or less ignoring Google’s new My Library feature, because a quick skim of the announcement told me more or less what Tim summarizes in the LT post:
Google just doesn’t have the sort of books that regular people have. Most of their books come from a handful of academic libraries, and academic libraries don’t have the same editions regular people have. Then there are the books publishers have explicitly removed from Google Book Search. Success rates of below 50% were common.
But the bookmarklet sounded cool, so I exported my library and pasted the ISBNs into Google.
The result? “Added 160 books [...] Could not add 989 items.”
How delightful. Of course, I’m happy to be able to search those 160; don’t get me wrong. And I’m pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of my small press books, particularly those from Subterranean, Meisha Merlin (RIP), Old Earth, Prime, Golden Gryphon, and Night Shade were among those imported. Quite a few of my web reference books made it in, too, which will be useful.
Being able to search the text of my books, and having the result come up as a scan of the page with my search terms highlighted, is unspeakably cool. Google is just limited by their own manpower and by publishers’ restrictions, which is a shame. This could be a great service. Right now the limited selection of books makes it mostly a toy.
(ETA: be sure and see the comments for a tip on improving Google’s recognition rate.)
Comments
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Posted by
http://claimid.com/timepiece on September 18th, 2007 at 5:49 pm -
Oh, very good tip! That’s exactly what I was doing, and I’d forgotten that Excel is so very “helpful” with leading zeroes. It didn’t zap all of them, though, which I find bizarre.
Still, that got me closer to 50%. Thanks!
Posted by steph on September 18th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
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Glad to be of help! Too bad it didn’t help even more than that. Still it looks like you went from somewhere around 15% to 50%, so that’s certainly significant.
Tim was actually the one who realized what was going on.
Personally, I can’t wait until the Google Book Search Search gets fixed. I only managed around 150 before it got stuck on one of mine, and then Tim took it down. But now you can get a link to the book on Google (on the social data page) if it’s there and someone ran it – viewable in your catalog too (new field).
Posted by
http://claimid.com/timepiece on September 19th, 2007 at 10:33 am
How did you import your ISBNs? Many of us were exporting to a csv and opening it in Excel, then copying the ISBN column – and Excel automatically strips all leading zeros unless you format the cells with a custom format (just put in 10 zeros, which will ensure everything has at least 10 digits).
When I corrected that, my find rate went from something like 40% to closer to 75%.