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For hardcore Book Geeks
December 14, 2007 | 1:23 am
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By Carol Jurd
If you find books like Copleston‘s History of Philosophy to be among your favourite bedtime reads, or think Thucydides is more exciting than Dan Brown, then you are probably a Book Geek. Don’t fret, it’s not fatal (unless you try to cross a busy street whilst reading Virgil) and a lot less expensive than an addiction to sports cars or yachts.
Over the years I have learned to ignore comments from friends and family in the vein of, “Are you actually reading that?” or, “Don’t you have any interesting books?” Sigh!
In fact, with the resources of the Internet you can stock up on very geeky books for the cost of your broadband connection. There seems to be a large amount of material printed in the late 19th/early 20th century, now out of copyright. There are also some more modern academic publications available at eScholarship Editions. Not for download, but can be read on-line.
For the Classics geek there is TextKit. Books are in PDF format and cover Greek & Latin texts, grammars and so on. How could you resist “Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb” by William W. Goodwin?
The Digital Book Index lets you search by subject matter or term for Ebooks, also providing details about publication date, format, whether the book free or for sale. The subject list is quite amazing – nine pages of books on Philosophy? Over thirty subheadings under Agriculture? These people have literally left no stone unturned!
The Intra Text Digital Library contains many works by ancient writers, many in their original languages, also English & Italian. Format is mainly HTML for on-line reading.
Project Gutenberg contains a vast amount of material, but I do think its search page could do with a little attention, some of the results seems a little strange at times.
Finally a word of praise (yes!) for Google Book search – they seemed to have listened to the criticism and now have it right. Searches for obscure works and subjects brought instant (and mostly sensible) results. A pity they all seem to be in PDF or text format, but given the confusion over formats it is not surprising.
And having just found Heinrich Ritter’s “The History of Ancient Philosophy” I am now going off to read a good book!
Technorati Tags: classics,philosophy
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Comments:
Carol, I must thank you deeply for reminding me of Google Book Search. I hadn’t tried it since it began. I plopped in a name I had done some historical research on back in the late 80s/early 90s and have just been astounded by how much material has been digitized! There are materials there I never knew about nor would have known how to find.
What puzzles me — and makes me want to reach through the screen at the DMCA proponents! — is why some books from the *1800s* only have snippets instead of full PDFs. One such book — which seems crucial — was from the NYPL collection! Grrrr.
I’ve already downloaded over 300MBs of PDFs I never would have had otherwise. Thanks again very much!
And what makes snippets even more irritating: sometimes the highlighted word is actually off the top or bottom of the lousy snippet!
Snippets for things published in the 1800s!
I hate snippets!
Eternal Copyright:
White’s 1845 Norfolk.
by of Sheffield William White – 1969
“A reprint of the 1845 issue of History, gazetteer, and directory of Norfolk.”
I mean, the *original info* is from 1845, but because it was *reprinted* in 1969, Google BS (as I now refer to it!) can only show a *snippet*.
This is just plain wrong.
And this!
Index to United States Census of Georgia for 1820
By Georgia Historical Society
By Georgia Historical
Society
Published 1969
– Google BS doesn’t show a thing!
Feh!
I went through all 37 pages of results. In a year I’ll do this again and see if the page count of results has increased and to what degree.
In all, 1.12GB of PDFs. Thanks, Carol!
I can’t believe an 1820 census is not in the public domain! Makes you wonder who would re-copyright such a document and why?nI mean, it’s not like the information is going to be on-sold to telemarketers, is it?
“I can’t believe an 1820 census is not in the public domain! Makes you wonder who would re-copyright such a document and why?nI mean, it’s not like the information is going to be on-sold to telemarketers, is it?”
The 1820 census is in the public domain and available here:
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1820.htm
Hmmmm… I’m also beginning to wonder just how well Find functions in PDF. I’ve tested the ones I d/led and while the text string was found in the online Google version, Find in the d/led PDFs comes up empty. Grrr…
Thanks for the census link. Find didn’t work there, either!
Another great source of digital material: the Libronix Digital Library from Logos Bible Software. It is far more interactive than PDF, and contains advanced search functions.
Newly available, actually, is Goodwin’s Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb.