Author Archive

Posted by Rie Hirabaru, Associate Marketing Manager

Novels are like fingerprints: they may share the same basic pattern, but each one is unique – especially if you consider the infinite variety of ways they can affect people. I'm a huge fan of Paul Auster, so whenever I meet someone who’s similarly enthralled, I always want to dig deeper. One of the first questions I ask is how they discovered him.

I first heard about Auster through a friend of mine, and fell in love with his books after reading City of Glass, a detective story that brilliantly subverts the genre. It was unlike any other book I'd ever read, and I remember finishing it in a single day. Five years later, I've plowed through almost all of Auster's books, so I was excited to see them begin to appear in Google Book Search. I was even more excited when I realized I could use the index to explore his connections to other writers.

Case in point: I plugged in the search terms "Paul Auster," "City of Glass" and "crime," and found a book identifying Raymond Chandler as a writer likely to have influenced him. It turns out Chandler wrote canonical detective stories in the '30s and '40s – the kind where the hero gets a phone call in the middle of the night from a mysterious stranger, who just happens to supply the single vital clue that solves the crime. That's exactly what takes place in City of Glass, except there's a metaphysical twist – the hero is a mystery writer, and the stranger on the other end of the line says he's looking for Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency.

It's inspiring to imagine that as we continue to build the Google Book Search index, more people will be able to unravel mysteries – identifying patterns and connections not only in literature, but every subject that spurs our curiosity.

Posted by Theresa Rij, Book Search Support Team

We get email, lots and lots of email. And we love it all. It's especially exciting when we receive an email that tells a story about a time in someone's life when finding the right book has such a positive impact, the person is moved to write to us. Like this email, sent from a hard-working grad student:

As a graduate student working on some pretty heavy duty research, I think Google Book Search rocks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. On multiple occasions, I've discovered just enough information here to get the titles, which then propels me to the library where (much of the time, fortunately), I can get the whole text. Case in point: I'm researching marital and sexual attitudes in 17th century England. I type in "shakespeare marriage" and, wham, up pops B. J. Sokol's Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage from Cambridge University Press, 2003. It's *perfect.* Would I have found it without Google Book Search? Perhaps. But I also might have found it much later, and not allowed it to have the impact in my thinking and research it now does. Did Cambridge UP lose a sale? Um, no. I'm a grad student: I live in the freaking library. But they did gain another reference, and a someday sale when I get a tenure track position (fingers crossed). Additionally, they get heaps of good will because I know that they care about getting their catalog into circulation as conveniently as possible. That makes them cool. This has helped me discover information hidden where I otherwise would never find it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It's wonderful to hear that we're helping bring great books and people together, and as our index grows, we hope this kind of connection will happen more and more. If you've had a similar experience, we invite you to share it with us.

Posted by Bethany Poole, Product Marketing Manager

I'm brand new at Google, so I've been digging around on our site, exploring everything I can click on. Yesterday, I was talking with a few colleagues about the parallel universe hidden inside Google Book Search. Okay, okay -- so it's not really a parallel universe. But it struck me that by making so many older books discoverable online, we're building a sort of lens to the past.

In this 1841 book, for instance, you can see how the author, Roswell Park, envisioned organizing all human knowledge, through a system classifying "all of its branches, and illustrating their history, relations, uses and objects." (Interestingly, Park gives an estimate of the number of books in the world by 1816: two million total, with the number printed per year in America estimated at only 500.)

Skipping ahead to 1915, you can find a book about how to write for the movies -- back when the movie industry was so new, the word "movie" still merited quotation marks. The advice -- penned by none other than Louella Parsons, who was on her way toward becoming one of the first influential Hollywood gossip columnists -- is remarkably fresh:

Nearly everyone who goes to the picture shows night after night has some plot stored in his mind that he thinks would make a good photoplay, if he only knew how to properly construct the story! Ah, there's the rub! If only he knew how to put his story into a motion picture scenario! You may have a dozen clever, unique plots, but if you are ignorant of scenario construction your ideas are practically valueless.

Yikes.

If you're a history buff, student or just plain curious about the past, give Advanced Book Search a try, limiting your search to books published in a particular time period. You may be surprised by what you find.

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

One hundred and thirty years ago today, gunfighter Wild Bill was famously murdered by Crooked Nose Jack. That might sound like an episode of Deadwood -- the fourth episode of the first season, to be exact -- but the murder of James Butler Hickok by Jack McCall was, of course, fact before it became fiction.

Never one to let his guard down during a poker match, Hickok (Wild Bill) always sat with his back to the wall -- protecting himself from outlaws who might attack from behind. But on August 2, 1876, the seat in his preferred position wasn't available, and Hickok was facing the wall with his back to the door when he was shot in the head.

You can find details about the murder in an 1888 book, Our Pioneer Heroes and Their Daring Deeds. Legend has it that Hickok died clutching his poker hand: a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights. That part of the story is recounted in the Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws and elsewhere. Today, poker books like this one refer to this set of cards as the "Dead Man's Hand," and the gravestone of Charlie Henry Rich -- the dealer who dealt Hickok's famous last hand -- pays tribute accordingly.

If you ever find yourself en route to the real Deadwood, South Dakota, Frommer's Exploring America by RV can help you catch a reenactment of the shooting, as well as find Wild Bill's own gravesite at Mount Moriah Cemetary. (And if you're not planning a trip anytime soon, you can see a photo in Tombstones: 75 Famous People and Their Final Resting Places.)

Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager

A Hare once made fun of a Tortoise.
"What a slow way you have!" he said. "How you creep along!"
"Do I?" said the Tortoise. "Try a race with me, and I will beat you."
"You only say that for fun." said the Hare. "But come! I will race with you."

You may remember how this story ends, or the one about the boy and the wolf, but how about "The Flies and the Pot of Honey," "The Fox that Lost his Tail," or "The Cat, the Monkey and the Chestnuts"?

Aesop, believed to have been a Greek slave who wrote in the 6th century B.C., penned these and many other fables that have been translated and printed countless times through the ages. This particular edition, published in relatively modern-day 1885, is part of the public domain in the United States, so readers in the U.S. can see every page in Full View* through Book Search. And because the full text of the book is searchable, Aesop enthusiasts can track down famous quotes, try searching for every reference to a word like "wolf" and crack open any old chestnuts they discover.

*Because copyright rules differ between countries, this book may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world. Where copyright status is in question, the book will not appear in Full View. We hope you bear with us as we confirm the status and, whenever appropriate, change the display.

Posted by Laura Debonis, Library Partnerships Director

I'm very happy to share some tremendous news: today we announced our partnership with the University of California libraries to digitize books in their collections and make them discoverable in Google Book Search (see the welcome message by the University of Michigan's John Wilkin on the main Google blog). This partnership is especially exciting because the UC system comprises more than 100 extraordinary research libraries housed at 10 campuses, representing a treasure trove of human knowledge that people everywhere will be able to search.

We're honored to welcome the University of California libraries to the Google Books Library Project. For more details on the partnership, you can read the UC press release, the UC Statement of Use and a brief statement on our Library Partners page explaining the UC libraries' vision and reasons for joining the project.

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

Google Book Search presents an exciting possibility for researchers of every kind: since each page of each book has its own unique URL, it's easy to share direct citations to individual pages.

Not long ago we told you about how one person, Bernie Robichau, searched for his last name and found details about his family history. But he's hardly alone; there are groups of people investigating their shared ancestry, unearthing and documenting pieces of history they've discovered in books.

One cool example is Alabama Genealogy in Color, a blog written by a group of "family history researchers with African American Alabama ancestry" to share the "triumphs and trials" of their personal research. Check out this post from July 19th to see how the group uses Google Book Search citations to point readers to particular pages in books.

Posted by Jen Grant, Product Marketing Manager

I'm one of those people who turns to books in times of stress. When my first child was born, I read a dozen books on every possible parenting challenge -- teething, crying, sleeping, diaper rash, etc., etc., etc. By the time my husband and I decided we were ready to have a second, I felt like I not only knew what to expect, but had become a full-fledged baby expert. I was ready for anything.

Then, of course, I found out I was having twins. Back to the books!

This time, I tried searching on Google Book Search, and I found some great new books with practical advice for raising twins. But I also found some fascinating older books, like this one from 1905, which examines the nature versus nurture issue before the official discovery of genes (the word "gene" wasn't coined until 1909). This more modern title from the American Philosophical Society explores the IQ and personality similarities among identical and fraternal twins raised in different families. But my favorite find is this book, in which Charles Darwin, writing a letter to his half-cousin Francis Galton in 1875, gives his two cents on the twin phenomenon:

Nothing seems to me more curious than the similarity and dissimilarity of twins.

I must say I'm kind of curious about that myself.

If you're looking for books on a particular subject, give Book Search a whirl. Since we're always adding new books from every era, you might find all kinds of fascinating stuff you don't expect...even if you're not expecting.

Posted by Jen Grant, Product Marketing Manager

When I was a little girl, I used to watch Star Trek (the original) with my parents. Sometimes, when asked if I’m a trekkie, I say “I was born of trekkies” -- although, to be honest, I'm actually a big fan myself. I often have random memories of episodes -- my favorite, of course, is the The Trouble with Tribbles (I bought cute little toy tribbles for my whole family one Christmas – they really do purr when you’re not paying attention to them). I like the movies, too. I remember laughing as Chekov explained he was looking for “nuclear wessels,” and crying when Spock said “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one.”

And while I went into marketing, my sister got her Ph.D. in astrophysics, spent time working at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and is now a research scientist who helps maintain and study the images that the Chandra telescope sends back from its orbit around Earth (for the rest of us: she’s searching for black holes).

That’s why I'm excited about the 40th anniversary of the original episode. (Yep – older than me. We were already watching re-runs when I was little.) Google is having some fun with this as well -- as you might imagine, we have quite a few trekkies here. We're on hand at the 5th Annual Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas this week demonstrating some of our products, including Google Desktop, SketchUp and a new one that allows people to see intergalactic creations right on their mobile phones.

When I heard about the convention, I started to think about how Google Book Search can help all of these trekkies -- or anyone! -- discover fun books about Star Trek. Of course there are the biographies, and books written by the actors. But what’s really interesting is looking at the influence Star Trek has had on literature. Who knew so many books quote Spock’s famous line from the movie? There's even a whole literary tradition of subtle references to Dr. McCoy’s famous refrain, “Jim, I’m a doctor, not a xxx.”

Try plugging in your favorite lines to see where they show up. It’s really pretty amazing to see how influential this show is.

Posted by Ruchira Datta, Software Engineer

We recently shared an email from a hard-working graduate student who told us about how she's using Google Book Search for research. The story brought me back to my own grad school days, when I first became acquainted with the work of 18th-century author Samuel Richardson. I was obsessed with finding out who wrote the first English novel -- an interest no doubt strengthened by the fact that the question was as far as humanly possible from the topic of my dissertation. :-)

In hot pursuit of the birth of the novel, I read John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress* and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Neither of them felt like a true novel. In my opinion, a novel should have real characters engaged in complex human interactions. Then I discovered Richardson's Pamela, in this paperback edition. Here, at last, was what I was looking for: a story about people and their relationships.

Next came Richardson's Clarissa (vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I read it as an e-text through Literature Online, to which my university had a subscription. I chose to read the last and longest unabridged edition, because I didn't want the text filtered by an editor. Like Austin Dobson, I felt instinctively that "Any retrenchment must be mutilation." In retrospect, the novel is repetitious until Clarissa's departure from home, but after that -- what a story of two real, flawed people! Lovelace, rather than being a caricature of a villain, vacillates believably between glee, remorse and obduracy. Clarissa has very little power over her destiny in her society and situation, yet regardless of that, she never gives in.

Finally, I read the e-text of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (vols. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It was a pleasant read, but with one problem: Sir Charles is too perfect.

Interestingly, I finished reading Clarissa as ASCII text (for convenience) before I learned that Richardson's italics and footnotes -- missing in the ASCII version -- are a significant element of the text. So I'm happy to see that with Google Book Search, today's grad students -- and anyone else who feels like it -- can not only find and search the full text of Clarissa, they can also explore the lively critical discourse it has inspired.

*Copyright rules differ between countries, so the books we link to in this post may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world. Where copyright status is in question, the book will not appear in Full View. We hope you bear with us as we confirm the status and, whenever appropriate, change the display.