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In order to get maximum value from a Limited Preview book, you should use the word search facility to select out those pages in which you are most likely to be interested. If you just scroll through such a book, you will find that there are great lacunae sequences of pages apparently missing, or unavailable. Using the word search technique will enable you to view even a page which is apparently unavailable. There will still be some inaccessible pages, and you may run into what Google Books calls your viewing limit for a particular work, but in general I find that I can get most of what I want this way.
you can, in effect, scan the whole book at one go, and read it quickly with the aid of an index entry thats been customized for your needs. A single search term wont squeeze all of the value out of a book, so even if you are reading a Google Book with keyword searching, its a good idea to try a number of overlapping terms that describe what youre looking for. Suppose that what Im really interested in is C19th ideas about the importance of open fire-places as sources of ventilation health-giving fresh air. I can search within the book for the word Ventilation instead, and now Ive got just one hit on a particular page.
(i)
Standard Mode, in which you can increase or decrease the page image size, and/or get two pages side-by-side in regular book view, or see thumbnails of a batch of pages at a time, and maximize the amount of the screen displaying pages by going to Full Screen, which eliminates distractions . All of these options are only available for Full View books; for some Limited Preview books, you can only see one page at a time. Plain Text Mode, only available with Full View books, where you see the text as interpreted by Googles Optical Character Reader [OCR] programme, which is not 100 percent accurate but is still pretty amazing. The great advantage of this is that if you are taking notes from a Full View book, you can copy and paste quotations or whole interesting passages from the Plain Text version.
(ii)
Whichever mode you are working with, you can also increase the amount of text you can see on screen at any particular time by using the standard Windows option View Full Screen (F11), which eliminates the Windows and browser menu bars at top and bottom, and gives you the biggest possible reading pane. Using these together, you can get a reading pane where theres enough space that two book-pages are actually quite legible side-by-side. Browsing: You can scroll through a book, from page to page; or move to a particular numbered page; or click the blue arrows to go forward or back a page; or, if youve done a word search within a book as described above, you can just go from the site of one hit to another (listed, with snippets, in the menu bar on the RH side of the screen). Its all very easy.
open your note-taking software, whatever it may be, and reduce the size of its window so that it just occupies the top LH corner of the screen (I work with a window thats about 4/5ths of the width of the screen, and a little over half the depth). This means that I can overlay my note-taking window on the reading pane, and by moving from one program to the other via Alt-TAB I can scroll through the book and take notes more or less as I go. (I can also, of course, drag the note-taking window around the screen if it gets in the way of reading the text.)
One of the easiest, with a Full View book, is just to download a PDF of the book to your own PC, or a Google eBook (good for some portable devices, and free for Full View, out-of-copyright works). These PDFs can of course be enormous, and you cant search within them in the way you can via Google Books. (What you need to do is to search for particular pages on Google Books, and make a note of them then you can go to them using the Adobe reader, but bear in mind: Google Books has intelligent pagination, whereas Adobe counts every page blanks, front matter, etc. So p. 374 of a book wont necessarily be the 374th page in a PDF file.) But if you want a permanent copy, and the ability to print off pages at will, this is a good option. You can build up your own little library of heavily-used works, for the duration of a project. You can also cut-and-paste from Plain Text view of a Full View book, if what you are interested in is just shorter extracts and quotes of the kind needed for notes. With a Full View book, you can also use the Clip option to copy a piece of text which you can then paste into your notes; you can also copy a picture. Method: * click Clip, and highlight the area of text or image that you want to copy using the cursor in the shape of a cross that appears on your screen; when youve marked a block of text or image like that, a new menu window will open giving you three options. * The first, Selection text, is any text within the area youve highlighted, but lacking punctuation and formatting copy the text you want from within the menu line, and then you can paste it into your notes; * The second, Image, is a snapshot of your highlighted block as an image. Copy the long URL and then open a new browser page and paste this web address into the address bar. Depending on the browser you are using, you will be able to save this image as a low-resolution JPEG or PNG file to your PC.
What I do is to make sure I name these files distinctively e.g. if theyre from an 1885 book by William Keep, Ill name the image from p. 236 as Keep_1885_236, so that as these copied images accumulate on my PC (a) several pages from the same work will be in the right order, and (b) I will always be able to link images to my notes, so that I can supply a full bibliographical reference for them if I need to. *** The problem arises when youre working with a Limited Preview book. For copyright reasons, you cant clip a copy of any text or images from these works. But, as usual, theres a work-around. What you do is to use the Windows Full Screen (F11) and Googles own pageviewing options (magnify/reduce, single or double page if available, full screen) to maximize the size of the page on your screen and minimize the amount of extraneous clutter; and then you use the PCs Print Screen key to snap the whole screen as an image onto the clipboard, which you can then paste into (say) a Word document. If what you want is to copy several pages or double-page spreads from a single book, you can paste them into a single Word doc, and organize them very easily in that way. Alternatively, you can paste these screenshots into image-editing software, which will enable you to e.g. save successive pages from a book as separate files, and also to clean up those images by cropping them down to the size of the page.
There are a few problems with this approach, e.g. youll find that the definition of the images is not great, for viewing/printing purposes. But its perfectly serviceable, and once you get the hang of it it is a good way to copy text and images from a Limited Preview book.
links to reviews (and if theyre in EJs to which we subscribe, or JSTOR, you can get the text of the review via the ULs links to individual journals) links to related books another good way of adding to your sense of the scholarship or printed sources relevant to a topic links to common terms and phrases within the book, which is a good, quick way of getting a sense of what a book is about, and of course finding the pages within it where a particular term or phrase appears
This is an extremely good, quick way of forming an idea of where a particular book fits within the universe of scholarship, and figuring out what you should wish to read, if you are interested in the topic(s) connecting this extended family of books and articles together. *** The trouble with Google Books is that theres so much in it that the temptation is to investigate every little feature. A few worth mentioning now in the menu column on the RH side of the About this book page: * the link to the publishers website this can be handy if publishers offer a view sample
chapter option for a book; it will add to the amount of a Limited Preview text that you can read. * the link to Amazon can offer the same facility, with their Look Inside service. * the Amazon link will also show you if theres a cheap secondhand copy available if youre doing a research project or are really interested in a topic, it may be worth buying a book (can even be cheaper and quicker than using DDS). * the Find in a library option. Google interconnects with WorldCat, and thus you can see if the University Library holds an item. Suppose that it doesnt? Stick in your postcode, and Google will tell which other libraries in WorldCats world hold the book, sorted in order of how far away they are. This can actually be very useful, even if (all too frequently for a US historian) the answer is that the nearest library is on the US E. Coast. I would be very glad to get feedback on this, if you try to follow these suggestions and find them either (a) useful or (b) too complicated to be helpful or (c) inadequate, and capable of being improved upon (there is a better way from A to B) or even (d) incomplete, because I have missed a feature you find valuable. Howell Harris h.j.harris@dur.ac.uk I will add to this advice at a (not too much) later date, notably to explain how to get around one of the most frustrating features of Google Books: it will tell you that a book (usually from the 1870s-1920s) period is available, but only in Snippet View, for copyright reasons. What can you do then? Well, one of the answers is to look for the same book in another online library that does not have such a restrictive interpretation of copyright law as Google. One of the best is the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/ which contains far more than simply books and periodicals. But if you search it just for texts http://www.archive.org/details/texts, you will find lots. The search interface is not as clever as Googles it just looks for search words in a books bibliographical metadata (author, title, subjects, etc.) but if e.g. we look for Samuel Pepys we will get (today) 359 hits sorted in the Internet Archives idea of probability order, with various different editions of the Diary and some old biographical studies at the top. The Internet Archive is in some ways nicer to use than Google Books e.g. some people prefer the way it presents texts onscreen in its Read Online mode, http://www.archive.org/stream/samuelpepy00lubb#page/n9/mode/2up -- its more book-like than Google Books. Its easy to save an image from a page to your own PC, and you can also download the Full Text of a book for ease of note-taking. But a fuller explanation of the joys of the Internet Archive, and indeed of other similar services (e.g. for French libraries and texts the Gallica digital library, http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN which has a lot of stuff in English too), will have to await another day.