Book People Archive

Re: World eBook Fair: 12 million downloads. Anyone notice?

Anders Thulin wrote:

>   Main eye-catcher on the web page is full text search?  Am I 
> interested? No.
> (But let's try anyway. I search for 'Scott'. Blank page. I search
> for 'chess'. Blank page. I search for ... no, why bother.)

Actually, the search on  http://worldebookfair.com/ appears to be returning
results for me at the moment.  I don't know if there was a glitch when you
tried it or whether there's a browser compatibility issue.  (I'm using Mozilla
Firefox.)  The results do get returned up in another window, which on
some users' setups may not be easily seen.  (Moreover, new searches seem
to overwrite that same extra window, which I find a bit annoying.  I'm
much rather have control over whether new searches come up in new windows
myself.)

I too am more of a fan of browsing than straight-up search, but that may
not be true of everyone.  One can support the other, of course; when I
do a Google search, I often get HTML pages that let me look around from
where I've landed.  On the World Ebook Fair searches, though,
I go straight to PDFs without anywhere else to go, so search and browse
can't be integrated.  (That said, it's still rather nice to have
a cross-collection full-text search, when it works.)

I'm always curious to know more about *how* people like to browse.  Larry
Sanger mentioned that he's interested in philosophy, for instance.  Here
are a few thing that might come up when looking for such materials:

   Google search, Philosophy:

     http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=philosophy&btnG=Google+Search

   World Ebook Fair search, Philosophy:

    http://www.qoop.com/worldbookfair/worldsearch.php?q=philosophy

   Online Books Page, call numbers in Philosophy:

     http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lccn&key=B

   Online Books Page, Philosophy subject headings, alphabetic listing
     (note that most of these headings have been automatically assigned):

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=subject&key=philosophy

   Online Books Page, Philosophy subject headings, conceptually clustered
     listing:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Philosophy

    LibraryThing, search on "philosophy" tags
      (Note that this covers the whole universe of offline books as well
        as online books.  We don't yet have tagging for The Online Books Page,
        but I'm working on a general framework for Penn Library tagging.)

 http://www.librarything.com/search_tags.php?searchbox=philosophy&Search=Search

I'd be interested in knowing more about what people find useful and not so
useful about these different avenues of discovery.

John