On Mon, 22 May 2006, Bruce Albrecht wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
And the latest estimated I have received show that Google's total number of books has just recently passed 50,000
i do believe you misread that. 50,000 public-domain titles, with another 42,000 under copyright, for a total of 92,000.
Then I was probably right to count Google's total as ~100,000 in my own public estimations, though I would prefer counts of downloadable books to avoid Google's new policy of: "Google Book Search is a means for helping users discover books, not to read them online and/or download them."
My searching found 50,000 public domain titles available as complete books, and another 42,000 that should have been available as complete books because they were published prior to 1923, but were only visible in snippet view. I have no idea how many books Google scanned published after 1922 which are probably PD because the copyright was apparently not renewed, nor the number of books scanned even though the book is still under copyright.
Are you saying that there are actually 50,000 downloadable full text Google eBooks? Any idea of their level of accuracy? Please allow me to renew the request from myself and LIS PhD Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, for a copy of the list we can look over, even if we cannot make it public. Thanks!!! Give the world eBooks in 2006!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Blog at http://hart.pglaf.org