~ How to find books and texts ~ ~ How to find any text written on our globe ~ (Yes, any, duh :-) Pearls of ebook seeking wisdoms in here, readers that will take the time to experiment a little will be able open many a virtual library door. Note that you may also enjoy a more specific unabridged discussion about ebooks 'webbits' and note also that this kind of search may be performed also using some underground searching lore Do not forget to check the older classrooms Books & books & dark riders    and Cat burglers in the museum after dark. Also remember the oldest 'webbit' trick of the trade, the so called "long reference fishing": "'who is that?' Frodo asked, when he got a chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur" :-)  Project Gutenberg   Full-length electronic texts   Collections on specific subjects   Searching books   Et ab hic et ab hoc   History of the e-book scene  1st published at www.searchlores.org in December 2003 Version 0.19, May 2005

---

 Our own book lists              Our own library 

---

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/, or Project Gutenberg at http://promo.net/pg/Home Pages: One of the first full-text Internet collections. Easiest to use by using the alphabetic or specific searches for author/title. Note that there are various "current" Project Gutenberg sites. Many o links provided on the web point, alas, to earlier addresses which are no longer being maintained.

Gutenberg's online catalog: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
Gutenberg's advanced search engine:http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/search

Gutenerg's Database search
Search by Author or Title. For more guidance, see the Advanced Search page, where you can specify language, topic and more.

Author: Title Word(s): EText-No.:

Note that often enough you have links to computer generated audio books in mp3 format as well...

offline catalogs
recent books

Full-length electronic texts

The WWW Virtual Library : The VL is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.   British mirror   Swiss mirror  

The University of Pensylvania Online Books Page: offers a search by author or title, as well as links to many web sites that offer collections of full-text publications: see below under Searching books 

ABU: la Bibliothèque Universelle:

• Catalogue des Textes
• Catalogue des Auteurs
• Recherche d'occurrences

Online Book Initiative

In parentheses: "In Parentheses is devoted to distributing texts, translations, and commentaries from a wide variety of areas and disciplines in an elegantly presented form", mainly medieval texts.

American Memory from the Library of Congress

Athena: authors and texts: thousands of full-text materials, many from other collections (such as Project Gutenberg) in several European languages. Links may point to website for collection instead of actual book.

The Bartleby project: limited collection of classic works of reference, poetry and literature. 

Dissertation Abstracts: Titles and abstracts from the most recent two years are available free of charge for most dissertations; older work requires access through a subscribing institution

Electronic Editions: Books from the University of California Press. As an experiment, the UC press has placed online the full text of selected books on its list in International Studies, Classics, Literature, History, Anthropology, Politics, and Religious Studies. The site uses frames to prevent downloading the entire book, but the full text can be read online.

Electronic Texts on the Internet: A list of lists from RefDesk

The Internet Public Library (Michigan university)
IPL Online Texts collection 18,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification.  Recommended.
IPL Search engine (advanced): http://ipl.s i.umich.edu/div/sitesearch/?words=

National Archives and Records Administration, this site is confusing to navigate, but has a rich collection of documents and images.  The National Archival Information Locator is the search page. Try the homepage for additional information.  The Archival Research Catalog is intended to replace this shortly.

Oxford Text Archive: Links to American Mirror for the OTA because the webmaster often has difficulty using the U.K connection. A large and intimidating listing of electronic texts via FTP. Not recommended for the computer challenged.

http://www.online-literature.com/: "We offer searchable online literature for the student, educator, or enthusiast. To find the work you're looking for start by looking through the author index. We currently have over 300 full books and over 1000 short stories and poems by over 90 authors."

Librarians' Index to the Internet (California)
http://lii.org/: a guide to Internet resources: a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 12,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries.
http://lii.org/advanced: advanced search mask, for instance:
doyle

Core Historical Literature of Agriculture: From Cornell: several hundred works covering all aspects of rural life and farming including nutrition, rural sociology, food preservation, and economic botany. Extremely well organized. Recommended.

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts: Several hundred works from the "western canon" with useful indexing and search tools. Recommended

Ancient Greek Sites on the WWW: Includes works by Plato, Socrates, Euripedes, etc.

The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School: Full-text digital documents relating to Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Has lots of basic legal documents and charters with supporting documents

Bartleby Verse American & English Poetry: 1250–1920. Full-text versions of six classic poetry anthologies.

CIHM: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions

Economic History Virtual Library (A-J) Economic History Virtual Library (K-Z) The Economic and Business History section of the WWW Virtual Library is maintained in Amsterdam by the Netherlands Economic History Archive.

Archive of the History of Economic Thought: maintained by Rod Hay of McMaster University: a large full-text collection of classic works in economics and political theory. Not all listed works are accessible to public users. Also provides classic reviews and bibliographies. Recommended.

EuroDocs: Western European Documents: Links to many full-text collections of documents.  Recommended

Frenc h Revolutionary pamphlets: From the Artfl project

Internet History Sourcebooks: By Paul Halsall at Fordham University. A large collection of primary texts and other materials, primarily collected for classroom use. Arranged in three groups, for Ancient, Medieval and Modern History, and many subgroups. Most links are to short selections from larger works, but there are also links to major websites such as the Galileo Project

Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ)  Scanned pages from selected years of 6 British 18th. and 19th. Century journals: Philosophical Transactions, the Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Builder and the Annual Register. Partly searchable. 

The Literary Gothic: In addition to a wide range of research aids, this site offers an extremely extensive collection of  literary works.  Easy to search alphabetically.

Medieval Manuscripts from The Digital Scriptorium: A test site containing images from the Bancroft Library, Columbia University and other libraries. Thousands of medieval manuscripts are catalogued, but the site is difficult to use. Read the search tips carefully. Manuscripts are stored as images, so they are slow to load. This site will probably involve a fee when completed, so try it now.

The Online Medieval and Classical Library  from Berkeley.  Searchable.  Recommended.

Model Editions Partnership: experimental site offering editions of classic American papers including Documents of the First Federal Congress, the legal papers of Abraham Lincoln, and the papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as an exercise in the preparation of web editions of texts. Four of the editions are based on full-text searchable document transcriptions; two are based on document images; and one is based on both images and text.

Ch ristian Books on the Web: Large collection of bibles and prayer books, Augustine, Loyola, Calvin, Law, Pascal. Bunyan, Foxe

Sacred and Religious Texts: From Bahai to Zoroastrian

Secular Web Historical Texts Library: electronic texts of authors such as Lucretius, Paine, Voltaire, Locke, Spinoza, Darwin, and Russell

• Entering austen, jane in the Author field finds
  books by Jane Austen.
  
• Entering Baum in the Author field and
  and oz
  in the Title field finds L. Frank Baum's Oz books.
  
• Entering dosto in the Author field,
  choosing the Exact start of name option, and entering
  underground in the Title field finds Fyodor Dostoevsky's
  Notes from the Underground, even if you don't remember
  how to spell more than the start of the author's name!
  

QSUCHE

Converting .LIT files for fun and profit (14/11/03 15:30:29) One more, also with sources :) http://www.kyz.uklinux.net/convlit.php the core of the lit format is the LZX compression, used also in the CAB and CHM format. See libmspack : A library for Microsoft compression formats The purpose of libmspack is to provide both compression and decompression of some loosely related file formats used by Microsoft. The intention is to support all of the following formats: File format name File extension Introduced Algorithm(s) used COMPRESS.EXE [SZDD] .??_ 1990 LZSS Microsoft Help .HLP 1990 LZSS COMPRESS.EXE [KWAJ] .??_ 1993 LZSS, LZSS+Huffman, deflate Microsoft Cabinet .CAB 1995 deflate, Quantum, LZX HTML Help .CHM 1997 LZX Microsoft eBook .LIT 2000 LZX, SHA, DES loki decompiling chm books (14/11/03 12:20:54) according to MSDN, you can use the same hh.exe to decompile such a file: hh.exe -decompile folder chm -decompile is the switch folder is the name of the destination folder where you want the decompiled files to be copied chm is the name of the compiled help file you want to decompile oxo Loki's "amazon" webbits Re: Re: some comments, hey loki (25/11/03 21:36:22) "Hey loki, i do not quite follow your hint to 'a closer look' to amazon. You mean there is something we can access that we do not see on amazon's 'frontside' or do you mean that amazon is more useful for searchers than we believe 'as it is', I mean without hidden functions?" I mean their engines are becoming more and more powerful, and i think we should keep an eye on it. I have solved the little quest about the illustration of the new emperor's clothes using the ability of amazon to show some scanned pages (the frontlap carry important 'meta' information). And now amazon allow to search inside the books. If you have read the solution of the 909 riddle, wrote by vvf and jeff, you already know the nice amazon-audio trick : change the .com part of the URL to .co.uk or .fr or .de or whatever you like and see the amazing thing: some countries let you listen to more clips than others! But I don't know yet if there are some hidden features that await us, but why don't we try ? There are already some good stuff dealing about that (btw, this book is already scanned and spreaded on the net ;) loki A small vignette by cgull Dear f+, A small vignette for your growing ebook section. Using Amazon's "Search inside this book" and some searching techniques to pull the webbit... Tools: ------ 1. Mozilla firebird [or any browser capable of disbaling javascript 'on-the-fly'] 2. Amazon.com account [made with false IDs of course] 3. Some grey matter to make "fishing-line carrots" ;-) Method: ------- 1. Login to amazon.com with your acct. using Firebird, leave javascript enabled for now. 2. Identify book of interest, in this example, let us pick up "Structural Bioinformatics", by Bourne, published by Wiley-Liss, Inc. [By all means a great compendium of papers pertinent to the field,and darn expensive to boot.] 3. Click on "Search inside this book" link, under the cover pic. 4. Before doing anything else, lets look at the table of contents or TOC, to identify the pages of interest to us. I pick up Chapter 27, "ab initio Methods" on page 547. 5. Well, now if we try leafing through the pages which amazon shows us (without even loggin in), we cant get too far. These are just TOC, index and front and back jackets. 6. But, with a shiny new amazon.com acct. you can log in and search inside the book. So lets do that for our chapter. 7. First try, "ab initio methods", 50 hits. OK. What now? Through the crappy page numbers shown in results, getting the page of interest is a nuisance. But look at the page number in the TOC, and append it to the query, "ab initio methods 547", bingo the first hit is the chapter 27's first page. 8. Ho hum, big deal. Amazon lets you see only two pages before and two pages after the page you pick from the results. That doesn't help much. 9. Well, what now? Darn, we are searchers, not thieves (to paraphrase +ORC, with due respect). 10. Hmm. There is something called Figures in this book. Lets make our "fishing-line carrot" based on that. 11. "Figure 27.1" is my next query. (Chapter 27, figure 1, duh!) 12. Bingo, on page 2 of the results, I have my target page # 549. Now I can go two pages back to get page # 548 and two pages ahead as well. 13. Just below that you can see the page for Figure 27.2 and so on... 14. Great, now that we can get to the pages, what next, u dont expect me to waste a forest prinitng those darn pictures directly from the browser, right? 15. Well, try right clicking and saving the page (pic!) that amazon shows. Hmm, nada, zilch, zero. NO USE. 16. Now, Firebird comes in to the rescue. Turn off javascript and you can right click and save the images . Just take care to save them as jpeg and number them according to the page numbers so that u can read them at leisure. 17. Have fun! and learn... Greetz to all the awesome folks at searchlores.org and fellow ~S~ seekers. ------------------------------------- All rights reserved and reversed. (c) 2004 Cgull More Amazon hacks by Ben Abusing-Amazon-Search-Inside-the-Book.writeback Abusing Amazon "Search Inside the Book" I just perpretrated my first abuse of the new Amazon "Search Inside the Book" service. It was interesting, educational and ultimately fruitful, though labour-intensive. A while back, I read the first half or so of Constance Hale's "Sin and Syntax" (which I thereafter lent to Gord; have I got it back since then? I can't recall). It contained a wonderful quote by George Bernard Shaw: If you do not immediately suppress the person who takes it upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the subject of literary composition, I will give up the Chronicle. The man is a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot and a self-advertising duffer... Your famous specialist ... is now beginning to rebuke "second-rate" newspapers for using such phrases as "to suddenly go" and "to boldly say." I ask you, Sir, to put this man out ... without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly" and "suddenly to go".... Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in in his place. The most distinctive word in that passage is easily Newfoundland, and dropping that into the query box at the Amazon Search Inside the Book page for Sin and Syntax did indeed return part of the passage. The result, though, is only the final sentence (and a section heading, with a shard of the first sentence thereafter): 1. on page 72: "... of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly" and "suddenly to go...... Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place. Carnal Pleasures Sometimes a writer does without other parts of speech altogether, letting a verb demand ..." A little experimentation showed that it is also possible to search for exact strings of text... such as the first few words in the present sentence. Lo and behold, a further search for "of choice between" revealed: 1. on page 72: "... "to boldly say." I ask you, Sir, to put this man out ... without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly" and "suddenly to go...... Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in ..." 2. on page 151 [...and so forth...] The rest of the quote was trivially reconstructed by applying the same process until the beginning of the sentence was found, then merging together all of the partial results. Altogether, seven queries These seven, in fact, in order last to first: "... 72 SIN AND SYNTAX "Ross wants you to for God's sake stop attributing human behavior to dogs." ... apoplectic. Shaw wrote this to the local paper: If you do not immediately suppress the person who takes it upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the ..." "... mar to our Anglo-Saxon tongue insist the split infinitive is a no-no, they're dead wrong. Copy editors need to back down, lest they earn the wrath of a latter-day George Bernard ... you do not immediately suppress the person who takes it upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the subject of literary composition, I will give up the ..." "... upon himself to lay down the law almost every day in your columns on the subject of literary composition, I will give up the Chronicle. The man is a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot and a self-advertising duffer.... Your famous specialist ... is now beginning ..." "... I will give up the Chronicle. The man is a pedant, an ignoramus, an idiot and a self-advertising duffer.... Your famous specialist ... is now beginning to rebuke "second-rate" newspapers for using such phrases as "to suddenly go" and "to boldly say." ..." "... famous specialist ... is now beginning to rebuke "second-rate" newspapers for using such phrases as "to suddenly go" and "to boldly say." I ask you, Sir, to put this man out ... without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between "to ..." ... "to boldly say." I ask you, Sir, to put this man out ... without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly" and "suddenly to go...... Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in ..." "... of choice between "to suddenly go," "to go suddenly" and "suddenly to go...... Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place. were necessary to reconstruct the entire paragraph - labour-intensive, yes, but very simple to automate. The structure of the query URL is pleasantly simple. Here is the second example, with the important parts highlighted: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/ 0767903099 ?v=search-inside&keywords= %22of+choice+between%22 The first part, of course, is the ISBN, and the second is the query string. It's a bog-standard escaped HTTP sequence, as simple as one could possibly desire. Screen-scraping the query result page for the text is trivial (nasty regex hint: if the query is non-empty, the desired string is in the first <td class="small">...</td> after the string "on Page". The latter is contained with an anchor tag, though this isn't strictly necessary to leverage) and turning the first three or four words of this text into another query URL is exactly as easy as you think. Ease notwithstanding, this is not a general-purpose way to retrieve the full text of a book. Fifteen to twenty queries or more are required to extract the full text of a single page, and the server load imposed by a single IP address trying to reconstruct an entire book could (does?) easily trigger server-side countermeasures. Also, no formatting is present in the extracted text, not even section headings, so the snarfing of structured text (textbooks, reference works, even index pages) would be prohibitively difficult to automate. Amazon has deeply impressed me with this: they've managed to create a tremendously useful resource which is minimally susceptible to abuse. I can't wait to see how the competition from Google Print shapes up. As long as we can fight off the Intellectual Property wolves, we may yet manage to create an informational golden age. The IRC path by book I have been searching for the book "MUD Game Programming" for quite a while, but could not find it using any of the techniques on the text Targets . I came across the string Premier.Press.MUD.GAME.PROGRAMMING.ebook-lib, though it was trying to sell me. I almost gave up, but then I remembered reading a IRC way to find music that mentioned books too. So I clicked on it, loaded irc, logged on to undernet->#bookz, then searched with @find, and the very first response was the book I wanted. Maybe the IRC page should be added to the Books target page? It is on the sound one, but not the books one. book (some links on this page have been taken from Margaret DeLacy site) ...so, where can I download those pesky doyle's books? (c) 3rd Millennium: [fravia+], all rights reserved