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Asian language bonanza at google books? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7169 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 3 12 October 2008 at 11:16am | IP Logged |
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Google books now seems to include limited previews of many books published by Cornell University. This doesn't sound very interesting. But some of the previews really don't seem to be that limited.
I've only checked the books on Indonesian. Beginning Indonesian through Self Instruction Vol 1 is heavily limited, but, much more Vol 2's include. And even more - 95% plus - is included of higher level books from the same series (Indonesian Conversations, Formal Indonesian, & a couple of others I can't remember the title of seem to be available.) I think these would totally usable with enough background. I'm gauging page availability based on the links in the contents pages at the front of these books. Perhaps there's some other page limit - I haven't hit it after downloading a few chapters. Even if there is, I doubt it would be impossible to circumvent (by cleaning cookies, or worst case using a different IP address.) It's also easy if slightly laborious to store pages from Google books for offline use - though I imagine this violates their terms of use. In Firefox 1) find your cache (just type about:cache into the address bar) 2) clear it 3) open the cache folder 4) open the book in google books 5) try add the suffix ".png" to the first files (usually about 20-50k) that appear after you open the book. 6) In Win XP you'll see a preview bottom left in the cache folder if you've got a png - clear enough to check it's a book page. 7) Advance through the book page by page renaming the pages xxx.png to keep them in sequence. (a bit of a pain - is there any way round this?) Perhaps joining the pngs into a PDF (eg use PDFmerge if you have Win XP...) I think GB's "preview" policy largely depends on the publishers. So if you know Cornell's published courses on languages you're interested in, you could well be in for an only slightly incomplete treat.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dutos Newbie Argentina Joined 5919 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 3 13 October 2008 at 5:47am | IP Logged |
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There's a couple of websites that provide links to the image files, but it's really not worth it. The main advantage is that within Google books, you can do a text search. There's other graphical issues there too. The average that I saw was about 80-90% on most books, but I've seen a few that are just a few pages-- literally 3 pages.
I couldn't possibly be happier that Google is doing this! I have purchased about 10 books in the past month as a direct result of being able to REALLY preview the books. (It's got to really interest me to order books from America because the shipping is quite expensive to South America.) With this Google preview, it's much like being in a bookshop now. It will be even nicer when you can just buy the eBook version of any title that's available. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 3 13 October 2008 at 7:31am | IP Logged |
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Wow, bonanza indeed! There are tons of books on Arabic.
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