Author Archive

Posted by Ellen Cano, Book Search Online Team

“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.” – Virginia Woolf

Lately, I have reacquainted myself with many of the feminist writers of last century, those for whom my teachers always displayed admiration, or a keen critical eye. Today marks the 127th birthday of one of the most important modernist and feminist literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf.

To me, Woolf has always embodied the ideal of an independent woman years ahead of her time. This was evident in one of her famous non-fiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she analyzed and summed up the failed role of women in literary fiction. With this in mind, Woolf proposed a thesis that influenced generations of women to produce countless literary works: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

In the early 1900s, Woolf was a part of London's Bloomsbury Group, a loose organization of intellectuals (including John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Foster, and Roger Fry) who regularly gathered in the famous Victorian neighborhood of Bloomsbury.

While Woolf was influenced by the society that surrounded her, she employed an innovative writing technique, using fractured narratives and stream of consciousness to analyse the underlying emotion of her characters. This technique, emulated by many authors today, allowed her to fill her writings with visual impressions. When reading Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I can imagine how Clarissa Dalloway felt:

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June"

This is similarly the case with the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse (1927), and also again in The Waves (1931). The Waves is a personal favorite of mine, and is considered by many to be Woolf's masterpiece, where six friends’ reflections make up the novel’s center surrounded by a wave-like atmosphere.

Although loved by many readers, critics of the writings of Virginia Woolf can be found in many books, magazines, plays, films and even blogs. Yet, no one can deny the influence that she has had on literature, not just on her own time but even today, as her works and life continue to be relevant.

“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you set upon the freedom of my mind.” – A Room of One’s Own

Posted by Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen, Book Search Mobile Team

One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pacman while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.

What if you could also access literature's greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain's hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:

Posted by Laura Harold, Book Search Online Team

"It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of." - Neil Gaiman on Coraline

For US fans of author Neil Gaiman (and anyone who likes a good, creepy story), this weekend's release of the film version of Coraline was cause for big excitement. If you haven't read the book, it's a quick and satisfying read — a young-adult novel that's just as scary and fun for adults. Coraline tells the story of a little girl who opens a secret door in her parents' home which leads to a parallel world. At first, this escape seems like a dream come true, until she realizes that her "other mother" may not be as inviting as she makes herself out to be...

If this piques your curiosity, you can preview the book on Google Book Search and then buy it using the Buy This Book links on the right side of the screen. I spent some time last week reading more about Gaiman in a cool book I found called, "Prince of Stories," and then watched Gaiman's talk as part of the Authors@Google series (skip to about the 24:30 mark to hear him talk about the writing of Coraline - pretty fascinating).

The film adaptation was directed by Henry Selick, the man behind dark and awesome kid classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas and the film version of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. From the trailers I've seen online, the interplay of Selick's style of animated storytelling and Gaiman's fantasy world hints at a movie that might actually be as good as the book it's based on.

So, for all of us who love Gaiman works like Stardust (also recently made into a film), American Gods, and The Wolves in the Walls, this should be a great movie. Happy reading (and movie-going)!

Posted by Michael Williams, Bibliographic Evaluation Team Manager, University of Oxford

February 12th is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species.

An important book on evolutionary biology, it created widespread interest for its controversial ideas that contradicted the leading biology theories of its day. Famously called "the most important single work in science" by scientific historian Bern Dibner, On the Origin of Species revolutionized modern scientific thinking and established Darwin as one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

Only 1,250 copies of the book were printed, of which 1,170 were for sale. Such was the interest in the work that it is believed that all available copies sold on the day of publication. Copies of the first edition are therefore very rare.

With Darwin's anniversary approaching, the Bibliographic Evaluation Team (BET), which is responsible for preparing Oxford University's material for scanning, wanted to make sure that an Oxford copy of On the Origin of Species made it online. There are two first edition copies within the University Library, so we arranged for the Plant Sciences Library copy to be scanned in late January.

While the book was only away from the library for a day, preparing the catalogue metadata took much longer. Thanks to the hard work of the BET and our colleagues at Google, you can now search and read the full text of this classic book online.

On the Origin of Species is one of many hundreds of thousands of Oxford University books now available through Google Book Search, and we look forward to bringing even more volumes online for scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Posted by Inbal Drukker, Online Team

My bookshelves at my parents' home are filled with children's literature, and one of my favorite authors growing up was Judy Blume, who turned 71 yesterday. On a recent trip back home, I spent quite some time in my old room, reflecting on books that affected me most as a child growing up in Israel. Yet this visit was different from previous trips back home. I was thinking about these books not just as an adult but also as the parent of a newborn spending her first autumn at her grandparents' home. Which books will she be reading when she grows up? Will she join the family club of Judy Blume aficionados?

Looking back at my teen years, one of my favorite books was Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I was in awe of her ability to capture the confusion, angst, and the whole range of emotions I was feeling in those crucial years. In Deenie and Blubber, I learned how important acceptance is, while Tiger Eyes taught me about coping with death. I was fascinated by the tense friendships in Just as Long as We're Together. And as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I connected on a very personal level with Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself which deals with antisemitism.

When my daughter turns 10, we'll share laughs reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, and as she grows older I will introduce her to more of Judy Blume's work. As someone who cherishes her childhood books and who's helped preserve children's songs, I hope that generations to come will keep reading and learning from Judy Blume's classics. To Life, Judy Blume!

Posted by Xian Ke, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search

The latest Oscar award winners will be announced today. What does this have to do with books, you wonder? More than you may think! Just as books provide a source of inspiration for our own lives, so do they inspire screenwriters, directors, and actors to craft award-winning motion pictures.

Let's take a look at the Best Picture Oscar nominees for this year. Can you tell how many of these nominated films are based on books? You might wish to phone a friend, but wait one moment.

With a sleuthing mindset and Google Book Search at your disposal, you can discover and dig into source materials for some of the world's most popular movies. Curious about the magical story of Benjamin Button, I typed in a quick query and found book results for a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. How intriguing!

As it happens, all of this year's Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture have some roots in books:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" from "Tales of the Jazz Age" was the basis for this year's eponymous film.
• David Frost's account of his landmark television interview of Richard Nixon helped in scripting the Frost/Nixon.
• Randy Shilts' biography on "The Mayor of Castro Street" is an acclaimed account of Harvey Milk's life, brought to the big screen this year in Milk.
• Bernhard Schlink's novel about a woman's devastating secret was adapted to film in The Reader.
• Vikas Swarup's rags-to-riches story, "Q & A" has touched the millions who've seen the film version in Slumdog Millionaire.
  

Now then, the richness of books and the mass appeal of movies raise that time-honored question: which is better, the movie or the book?

Regardless of your answer, it's fun to discover and indulge in the delights of each experience. So go ahead! Enjoy the stories however you wish, and let Google help you with both movie showtimes and serendipitous finds of books that you never knew existed.

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

Welcome to another edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This week's message comes from Michael, who writes:

I love Google Books. [But] when I'm looking for a book and I do a Google search on it (a regular Google search, not specifically in Books), why doesn't Google "find itself"? Is it because it's in Beta? I'd rather have it pop up at the top of a Google Search as opposed to having to make a "special" search at books.google.com.

Thanks for the insightful question, Michael. Deciding which type of content to show in results for a specific search term is an interesting and challenging question. When you search for a term and a book is the best source of information, we want you to be able to find it easily.

Say, for example, you type "Shakespeare" in to Google. Are you looking for biographical details about the playwright, a picture of the man, videos of performances of his works, or to read and buy a copy of one of his works? This is the kind of challenge in ranking search results that is exciting for our teams to tackle.

When searching on our homepage, http://books.google.com, you are directly searching the text of over 7 million books. For searches on Google.com, we will blend books into search results when we think it fits the query. In fact, this blending of results in Google.com is the largest driver of book views and traffic.



If you search for a specific book on Google.com, such as The War of the Worlds, the cover of the book and a link to a Book Search result appears in the top results. Similarly, if you search Google.com for a specific author, such as Octavia Butler or Geoffrey Chaucer we'll provide you with a cluster of their books in your results. Book results also come up for general search terms when they are the best fit, such as "organizing your sock drawer."



On a separate note, the Google Scholar team also blends book results into their scholarly material search results. Google Scholar is a search tool for finding academic literature which is available and indexed online. Some of this content is found on Google Book Search, so for certain queries like "Albert Einstein," Google Scholar will show book results too.

We are continually working on better ways to surface relevant book results on your searches, along with new functionalities when viewing books on Google Book Search.

Posted by Inbal Drukker, Online Team

February marked the 181st anniversary of Jules Verne, a French author who often wrote of travel and exotic voyages. From a hot air balloon ride over Africa to a wild rafting adventure in the Amazon or an intrepid journey to the center of the earth, Verne's writings took readers to places new and unheard of. To visualize all of the different places described in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of Verne's classic novels, scroll down the About the book page to the map of places mentioned in this book.

Beyond setting his stories in foreign geographies, Verne also wrote about submarines, helicopters, airplanes and cars at a time when these travel vessels sounded like pure imagination. These and other forward-thinking elements in Verne's writings have made him remembered as one of the all-time greatest authors of speculative fiction.One of my personal favorite Jules Verne adventures is Around the World in 80 days, which foretells with uncanny accuracy the inventions and technology of the 20th century, and has become a literary stepping-stone for generations of science-fiction writers. In a sign of how this classic story still resonates with people to this day, on a recent visit to Israel I was thrilled and surprised to see an exceptional stage production of Around the World in 80 days in Hebrew.

Yet despite the global resonance of his works and the astonishing variety of geographic settings in his stories, Verne himself wasn't much of a traveler. Most of his boat trips remained within the boundaries of the Mediterranean sea, and he eventually had to stay home in Amiens after his leg was shot and injured, giving him a permanent limp. In his lifetime, Jules Verne published a remarkable corpus of 65 novels, 25 short stories and essays, three plays, and an opera libretto. For all of these adventures, thanks Jules!

Posted by Ben Bunnell, Book Search Library Partnerships

Posted by Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager

Sunday, April 12 is Drop Everything and Read Day (and, incidentally, author Beverly Cleary's birthday). "Beatrice Quimby's biggest problem was her little sister Ramona." So begins the beloved Beverly Cleary's first book featuring Ramona, Beezus and Ramona. Many teachers and school officials would say that one of our biggest problems today is getting children to read. To help counter that, teachers and many other educational associations created an organization and a plan called "Drop Everything and Read!" For "D.E.A.R. time" at my children's schools, they literally drop their pencils, notebooks, textbooks, workbooks, and so on, grab a book, find a space and have some uninterrupted time to read. (I may ask Google HR if we can do the same thing here.) The sound of things hitting the desks and clattering to the floor can be rather loud.