It had to happen sooner or later. An e-book composed entirely of digitized fingers that have crept into a page scan.It's listed under the guise of A True Copy of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Greenshields (1709) which was originally digitized April 27, 2009 from Oxford University and is available for freeAbove image is the page spread, below some sample pages:A True Copy of a Letter from the Reverend Mr. Greenshields. From the Goal of ... - James Greenshields - Google Books: h/t The Art of Google BooksPreviously on Book Patrol:The Hands of Google
E-Books in the Round: Google’s Digital Bookcase
The digital designers at Google have come up with a new way to browse Google Books. The challenge - designing a 21st century virtual bookcase to display e-books. They "imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf." And what they came up with is a bookcase that's an infinite 3D helix. That you can spin side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. The shelf holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.The books...
Google’s Typographic Salute to JFK
Here is the logo Google is using today in honor of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.The logo is composed entirely of words used by JFK in his speech.Pretty cool.You can watch the speech here.
Book Flipping Scanning
No, this not a new Olympic sport for librarians. It is the latest prototype from the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo.They're calling the process 'book flipping scanning'. It allows one to scan a book by simply flipping its pages in front of a a high-speed camera. Currently, it can digitize a 200-page book in a minute.Here's the details, courtesy of the robotics blog of IEEE Spectrum:The camera operates at 500 frames per second, with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. For each frame, the system alternates between two capture modes. First it shines...
The Google Books Settlement: The Monster and the Maze
This is Asaf Hanuka's amazing illustration of the Google Book Monster which appears on the cover of this month's issue of California Lawyer. It accompanies Tom McNichol's feature story on GBS, Saving the World from Google.click to enlargeThe Library Copyright Alliance has released this dizzying chart outlining all the legal possibilities that still remain. They have named this maze; “GBS March Madness: Paths Forward for the Google Books Settlement."Looks like there is still a long way to go before this one is settled.Thanks to Brave New World for the lead on the diagram.