Comparison of Google Books and Open Content Alliance

I read a lot of stuff online, but I have never really taken the time to really look at Google Books or the online books published by the Open Content Alliance. The majority of the time I prefer a regular, bound, paper book – preferrably one that is old and dusty and dry enough to suck the moisture out of my finder tips as I turn the pages. My only experience reading an e-book was several years ago when I downloaded a pdf version of a fitness book onto my Palm Z22. At the time Palm had a PDF reader plug-in, which was pretty clunky (it may be imploved now) and forced me to scroll back and forth as I read across each page. Recently I have begun reading blog posts from my cell phone, the screen is surprisingly bright and easy to read despite the screen being so small and I have found it to be very comfortable to hold the phone as a would a regular book. For me the real downside to reading an e-book, especially one in PDF format, is the scrolling. The fact that blog posts are in an HTML format means that they can be reformatted and optomized for a small screened reader or cell phone very easily.

In reviewing the text section of Archives.org and Google Books I wanted to first look at the search interface of each repository; how easy is it to search, what information is produced by search resuly, how robust is advanced search, is the visoal layout of the site inviting or intimidating, does the site “just make sense”, and can search results be captured by Zotero or Endnote. There are other things that I noticed, but I suppose they will come up as I type.

The first thing that I noticed upon looking at each site (really two things) is that Google Books is a much better looking site and is much easier to get to. Conceptually, typing in Google.com/books or clicking on the “books” link on the google homepage makes much more sense than selecting the “text” link on Archives.org. Additionally, I search of “free books on google” or “free books on open content alliance” takes me to the homepage of each. The Google Books homepage is fairly inviting; breaking books into several categories, and offering suggestions of popular titles. The homepage for the OCA, though it has a much greater amount of information, is quite intimidating to look at. Neither offered particularly satisfying results when I used their search function to too look for full texts of the keyword “puppies”. The OCA search brought me a single hit, Naughty Puppies a nice book of childrens poetry, while the Google search delivered books of a more technical nature, with the first hit being a trade magazine which mentions canine gynecology.

The e-book that I decided to look up on OCA and Google Books is the 1921 edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, published by the Macmillan Company. Each site uses the scan of the document generated by Google, so it is interesting to see how each presents the document. Following my search, I selected the book on each site; on the google site I am taken to the a liveview of the book, on the OCA site I go to an about page and have to click further to get to the actual text. Each site offers (in addition to the liveview) the option of downloading the document or viewing it in an all text format like HTML. Google Books allows users to download the document in PDF format, while OCA allows visitors to download in DjVu and PDF (DjVu is a free document format similar to PDF). I could not figure out, on either site, how to download documents in HTML or plain text. The liveview on each site wass very similar, though the OCA version removes much of the navigational functionality while in this view, allowing the user to interact with the document, but forcing visitors to page back to get to the book’s about page.

In features are where the two sites really diverged. Google Books presents the text on the left side of the page with a navigational panel on the right. The navigational panel allows the user to full text search the document, jump to any section or page, write and read reviews, purchase the book, flag it as unreadable, add to “library”, go to the “about” page for the book, or look-up the book on Worldcat.org. The OCA site gives fewer options, but does provide one that is very interesting; you can purchase a printed and bound copy of the e-book.

The Google Book site also has a very nice about page; here the site lists the most cited passages in the book, and gives a diagram of the geographic locations mentioned in the book (this is an even more impressive feature when you look at a book such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne). This page also lists keyword and metadata associated with the text. 

I could go on for a long time talking about the various features of each site, search functions, quirky interface problems, etc . . but I will cut to the chase, I prefer Google Reader over Archives.org. Let me quickly explain why;

When looking up information for books I most often go to Worldcat, or Amazon (I know). Worldcat, especially, has a wonderful easy to use interface; I can quickly find exactly what I am looking for, cite it in Zotero, and figure out where I can obtain a copy of the text. There are too many features on the Archives.org website, too many links, and too much information that I am simply not going to use and all of it clutters up the screen. If I am going to look for a book I am going to look for it on a purpose built site, a site that does citations and does them well. If I want to check to see if a digital copy of a book is available I want to do so as quickly as possible, either browsing a collection or using a seach function. OCA has some nice features, but the ease of use of Google Books is a clear winner. I am also drawn to some of the interesting features that I mentioned above; the geographic information and the listing of “most popular” passages.

Google offers some surprisingly powerful feaqtures that are very well integrated so as not to intimidate users, additionally Google does not try to half-heartedly integrate academic features which are better realized in a site like worldcat.