Psychology of interacting with (Google's) ebooks.
I downloaded two epub's from Google Books and one or both of the book reading apps on my Android phone didn't even see one of them. I think that some of these collections are designed with the idea that the repository should be on the web, and you the reader should go search the web interface to find a book you want, then download that one book, have perfect confidence it's going to be cool to read and functioning properly, then maybe you'll go on to the next one a few days later. I don't think humans work that way. First of all web interfaces, especially on a phone, are inherently slow, and sometimes unavailable either due to wifi/ 3G coverage or due to embarassment about using "work bandwidth". The Google Books interface isn't *bad*, but it's still like being fed at a gourmet banquet with a baby spoon. The user may have one bad experience with a downloaded text, no matter how small, and they want to curate their own collection first, maybe hoard-up more books than they or their family could read in a lifetime, cull out the icky or malfunctioning texts, and then have say 20 on their reader and 2000 on a DVD in a safe in their basement. At least that's how I respond to having one or two minor problems. ;) I don't think that Google Books at least gets this. I spent so much time at Google Books, browsing in apparently spider-like fashion, that I got this warning: "We're sorry... ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now." I guess they're right. At any moment I was about to try to download a few hundred epub's. -- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com
Hi Greg, Am 02.02.2010 um 03:38 schrieb Greg M. Johnson:
I downloaded two epub's from Google Books and one or both of the book reading apps on my Android phone didn't even see one of them. You my have put the books on your phone. BUT does your Phone/reader know they are their?!!! On my Nokias I load music with thier tool from my Mac. But, I have to have the Player scan the phone for music to see them. Maybe you have to do that. Or maybe the reader on your Android needs some other files to see the books! Hope this helps.
regards Keith.
Greg M. Johnson wrote:
I don't think that Google Books at least gets this. I spent so much time at Google Books, browsing in apparently spider-like fashion, that I got this warning:
"We're sorry...
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
That may not be a quetion of getting `it´ but of getting `hit´. gutenberg.org too gets hit by dozens of spiders a day, some of them sitting on big pipes and working with up to a hundred threads. While one of those spiders is at work, a human user can just about forget getting anything out of gutenberg.org because all server cycles are used to serve the spider. This is why gutenberg.org automatically denies access to IPs that make more than a certain amount of requests per hour. I think with Google the problem may be even worse than with gutenberg.org. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
In my experience and opinion, Google Books is designed to be overly paranoid about the spidering issue. I can spend 15 minutes there searching for interesting books without even downloading hardly any of the them, and then Google goes into paranoid mode, and starts requiring "Captcha" on everything I do. Also, the search algorithm, whatever it is, is bizarre. One day I can find a particular book, I come back the next day and enter the same search terms, and suddenly Google Books can't find it any more. Having said that, I find I can usually live with a Google Book that I find and am interested in -- either in the PDF format or the EPUB, it depends -- assuming I can't find a PG version of the book where a real human being has fixed the scannos! Someday maybe I'll even learn to live with the occasional thumb that shows up in my books! Certainly it is cool the ancient and obscure things one can find on Google Books. Not clear their efforts are really overall to the long-term benefit of society however. And there is a general problem that the more residual benefits citizens find in old books, then the more likely our "representatives" will take away our constitutional rights to read and share old books, and "sell" those rights back to ebook retailers like Google -- as has already happened in the millennium copyright laws, and/or DRM.
Well said!!! mh On Tue, 2 Feb 2010, James Adcock wrote:
In my experience and opinion, Google Books is designed to be overly paranoid about the spidering issue. I can spend 15 minutes there searching for interesting books without even downloading hardly any of the them, and then Google goes into paranoid mode, and starts requiring "Captcha" on everything I do. Also, the search algorithm, whatever it is, is bizarre. One day I can find a particular book, I come back the next day and enter the same search terms, and suddenly Google Books can't find it any more. Having said that, I find I can usually live with a Google Book that I find and am interested in -- either in the PDF format or the EPUB, it depends -- assuming I can't find a PG version of the book where a real human being has fixed the scannos! Someday maybe I'll even learn to live with the occasional thumb that shows up in my books! Certainly it is cool the ancient and obscure things one can find on Google Books. Not clear their efforts are really overall to the long-term benefit of society however. And there is a general problem that the more residual benefits citizens find in old books, then the more likely our "representatives" will take away our constitutional rights to read and share old books, and "sell" those rights back to ebook retailers like Google -- as has already happened in the millennium copyright laws, and/or DRM.
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"James Adcock" <jimad@msn.com> writes:
One day I can find a particular book, I come back the next day and enter the same search terms, and suddenly Google Books can't find it any more.
So what? If the environment changes (more books, new reviews, external linking, etc.), yesterdays assumptions could be different or even "wrong" today. Sidenote: It is the same with the idea of the iso-8859-1 (or ASCII for languages, that require more characters) version of books. These days everything should be UTF-8 encoded by default. The ASCII idea was fine some twenty years ago, but today it is time for change. On gutenberg you cannot find most books at all! They simply do not exist in our cosmos. And waht's worse, even the important books are mostly missing or weakly done. I'm hapy that google offers all these books. If one issue has defects, chances are high that there is another copy in the Google cache that you can use as a remedy. -- Karl Eichwalder
On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 06:28:32AM +0100, Karl Eichwalder wrote: [snip]
On gutenberg you cannot find most books at all! They simply do not exist in our cosmos. And waht's worse, even the important books are mostly missing or weakly done.
I'm hapy that google offers all these books. If one issue has defects, chances are high that there is another copy in the Google cache that you can use as a remedy.
Do you have a list of these "important books" that PG is missing but which are available in Google Books?
In fact, DP recently had an active discussion about trying harder to work from lists of "important books" not yet on PG. This would be very helpful. On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 12:11 PM, Joey Smith <joey@joeysmith.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 06:28:32AM +0100, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
[snip]
On gutenberg you cannot find most books at all! They simply do not exist in our cosmos. And waht's worse, even the important books are mostly missing or weakly done.
I'm hapy that google offers all these books. If one issue has defects, chances are high that there is another copy in the Google cache that you can use as a remedy.
Do you have a list of these "important books" that PG is missing but which are available in Google Books? _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
Joey Smith wrote:
On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 06:28:32AM +0100, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
[snip]
On gutenberg you cannot find most books at all! They simply do not exist in our cosmos. And waht's worse, even the important books are mostly missing or weakly done.
I'm hapy that google offers all these books. If one issue has defects, chances are high that there is another copy in the Google cache that you can use as a remedy.
Do you have a list of these "important books" that PG is missing but which are available in Google Books?
Marx's Kapital Freud's Traumdeutung Russell's Principia Mathematica Grey's Anatomy ... just a few off the top of my head. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> writes:
Do you have a list of these "important books" that PG is missing but which are available in Google Books?
Marx's Kapital Freud's Traumdeutung Russell's Principia Mathematica Grey's Anatomy
... just a few off the top of my head.
Yes, and not a single text by by Novalis, just two books by Fontane, ditto by W. Raabe, three by Stifter, 1 text by Jean Paul. I think there is nearly a single German edition of poems of the Middle Ages (say, Walther von der Vogelweide). And litterature about these topics is also rather rare--Goggle offers tons of those. All the German Journals--there is basically nothing available from gutenberg.org. I'm not sure whether there are still broken LOTE editions at gutenberg.org, where you simple replaced umlauts with "machting" letters (ä -> a) for the sake of clean ASCII text... I do not blame us because of these defiancies, but please treat competitors respectfully, etc. pp. -- Karl Eichwalder
Well said!!! I should have posted this earlier. . .and mentioned thatI asked permission to use this, forward it, etc., in the future. . . . Michael On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Greg M. Johnson wrote:
I downloaded two epub's from Google Books and one or both of the book reading apps on my Android phone didn't even see one of them.
I think that some of these collections are designed with the idea that the repository should be on the web, and you the reader should go search the web interface to find a book you want, then download that one book, have perfect confidence it's going to be cool to read and functioning properly, then maybe you'll go on to the next one a few days later.
I don't think humans work that way. First of all web interfaces, especially on a phone, are inherently slow, and sometimes unavailable either due to wifi/ 3G coverage or due to embarassment about using "work bandwidth". The Google Books interface isn't *bad*, but it's still like being fed at a gourmet banquet with a baby spoon. The user may have one bad experience with a downloaded text, no matter how small, and they want to curate their own collection first, maybe hoard-up more books than they or their family could read in a lifetime, cull out the icky or malfunctioning texts, and then have say 20 on their reader and 2000 on a DVD in a safe in their basement. At least that's how I respond to having one or two minor problems. ;)
I don't think that Google Books at least gets this. I spent so much time at Google Books, browsing in apparently spider-like fashion, that I got this warning: "We're sorry...
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
I guess they're right. At any moment I was about to try to download a few hundred epub's.
-- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com
Marcello's story about big-pipe servers settling on pg makes me think of a Borg spaceship passing over a peaceful little village. At the risk of sounding like Eleanor Clift's response to the Soviets in "The Watchmen" movie, I'll ask: So what on earth are these big-pipe servers doing? Are they generating their own independent collection in case of a collapse of the internet? Are they engaged in some really inefficient search algorithm that requires opening every single file? Are they some Google wannabe who's indexing your site? Is it malicious mischief/ DOS? Or, is it a case of an "honest" (if cluelessly implemented) demand that could be met with some more products that could be torrented. Could that entity be looking for a MOBI of the top 1000 books, and EPUB of everything in the German language? ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:14:59 +0100 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Psychology of interacting with (Google's) ebooks. Greg M. Johnson wrote:
I don't think that Google Books at least gets this. I spent so much time
at Google Books, browsing in apparently spider-like fashion, that I got this warning:
"We're sorry...
... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
That may not be a quetion of getting `itด but of getting `hitด.
gutenberg.org too gets hit by dozens of spiders a day, some of them sitting on big pipes and working with up to a hundred threads.
While one of those spiders is at work, a human user can just about forget getting anything out of gutenberg.org because all server cycles are used to serve the spider.
This is why gutenberg.org automatically denies access to IPs that make more than a certain amount of requests per hour.
I think with Google the problem may be even worse than with gutenberg.org. -- Marcello Perathoner
-- Greg M. Johnson http://pterandon.blogspot.com
Greg M. Johnson wrote:
Marcello's story about big-pipe servers settling on pg makes me think of a Borg spaceship passing over a peaceful little village.
At the risk of sounding like Eleanor Clift's response to the Soviets in "The Watchmen" movie, I'll ask: So what on earth are these big-pipe servers doing?
Most of them are collecting innocent-looking phrases to inject into spam mails. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 07:00:43PM +0100, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Greg M. Johnson wrote:
Marcello's story about big-pipe servers settling on pg makes me think of a Borg spaceship passing over a peaceful little village.
At the risk of sounding like Eleanor Clift's response to the Soviets in "The Watchmen" movie, I'll ask: So what on earth are these big-pipe servers doing?
Most of them are collecting innocent-looking phrases to inject into spam mails.
Did you ever look into mod_evasive or a similar approach? It's a good way of automatically shutting down abusers. Takes some tuning (a bit like spam filters). This is something iBiblio would be happy to help with, I'm sure. http://www.zdziarski.com/projects/mod_evasive/ -- Greg
participants (10)
-
don kretz -
Greg M. Johnson -
Greg Newby -
James Adcock -
Jana Srna -
Joey Smith -
Karl Eichwalder -
Keith J. Schultz -
Marcello Perathoner -
Michael S. Hart