08-30-2006, 07:52 PM
The Googlification of the known universe continues apace, making the cybermen/dalek alliance look like a picnic on the purple oozing lawns of Skaro (in the eyes of some, at least), and their latest (and much heralded - it was on the BBC Radio 4 news this morning) venture is giving away free books. Hang on, what about Project Gutenberg, I hear you ask? Not so sexy, it would appear. Anyway, I have no idea of the totality of what lurks in their scanned vaults, but it includes Collingwood Bruce's Roman Wall in a bewildering range of shades (from white to tawny ;-). The text is searchable, in much the same way as the back issues of the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquries of Scotland is (by layering the scanned image of the page over the plain text version in the latter case - I once took one apart digitally to see how they did it...). Sadly, the woodcuts in Collingwood Bruce are rather low resolution, but hey ho, beggars can't be choosers.
Stanhope's Life of Belisarius is there too, at the same time as a re-issuefronted by the Good Dr Coulston hits the airport bookstalls.
You can flick through the digital pages or download the whole PDF of out-of-copyright books. All you need now is a medium to make them readable - I quite liked the person who printed books onto scarves to get around the current airport security lunacy.
Mike Bishop
Stanhope's Life of Belisarius is there too, at the same time as a re-issuefronted by the Good Dr Coulston hits the airport bookstalls.
You can flick through the digital pages or download the whole PDF of out-of-copyright books. All you need now is a medium to make them readable - I quite liked the person who printed books onto scarves to get around the current airport security lunacy.
Mike Bishop
