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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Nobody who has ever used Google Books would think that it's putting complete copies online. The results include pages with hits, plus pages around them. There are so many missing pages that books aren't readable.

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I do - or more accurately -I did. I remember years back there were techniques published that you could use by tweaking the URL to trick Google into giving you specific pages. I am sure people quite software to exploit that.

Can't I just search the last phrase on the last result page to get to the next page in the book?

Pretty sure it limits you to a set number of pages from any given book per day or something. I'm sure with sufficient effort you could work around it but a casual user can't just work their way through a complete book.

If that's the case then maybe we can write a program that scrapes 1% of 100 books every day. After 100 days we will have 100 books!

In my experience the books tend to have some pages which are always shown in the preview, some pages which appear never to be viewable in preview mode, and some pages which you may be able to preview if you have not reached your limit.

So after 100 days you'll probably still have 100 incomplete books.

At some point you could also just get the book from the library and scan/photograph and OCR it.

It's different. When doing something as your described in a public library, you're clearly breaking the library rules while you're in their premises and can be caught, very different than having that being done by a software your ran from your home. The former also does not scale to be economically profitable, where the later can be hacked once and ran to scrape thousands of books, basically a mass reproduction of books illegally.

1: I'd suggest you'd check out the book and bring it home with you and do the scanning at home.

2: This is not Google's first rodeo when it comes to scraping. I'd be surprised if you got more than a few days into the described process, so no, it certainly does not scale.

No. There is a holdback set of pages that are never displayed. At least according to the lawsuit.

You can't just thumb through all the pages. It's search based, so you'd have to know what phrases to search for. Meaning, you'd need to have the book already.

Google actually thought this through.

I've never had much luck with that :(

Have you tried switching to a different browser? Or a different IP-address?

No, I never cared enough. I could usually find what I wanted somewhere else. But then, I'm mainly talking about technical books.

I suppose you could also read a website through Google Search previews by putting the last few words of the current preview.

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