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Comment by kelukelugames | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

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.

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

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