Google Book Search, and: Live Search Books (review)

This quarterly column offers reviews of music resources in a variety of digital media, excluding any in purely digital audio format that would normally be reviewed as sound recordings. This includes CD-ROM products, World Wide Web sites, online subscription services and databases, and music-related software of any kind. This may include both free and fee-based resources. Some reviews may cover a number of related sources together. The dates of access for each review of an online source indicate the dates during which the reviewer was evaluating the resource. All Web sites were last accessed to verify availability on 23 May 2008.

Google Book Search and Live Search Books are making the full text of books available to anyone with access to the Internet. The two are differentiated by their approaches to finding books, and to searching within them. Google takes a librarian’s approach to the problem: they provide a lot of information and multiple ways to access it. This allows for incredible precision in searching. Microsoft takes a consumer’s approach, with a smaller amount of information, but with a focus on legibility and browseability. This lends itself towards a more populist form of access.

The Google Book project is the larger of the two, and it now includes the books of almost twenty major research libraries, as well as content supplied by publishers. Live Search Books is a significantly smaller project, with books drawn from far fewer universities and publishers. Another major difference between the two is transparency. In its “Help” pages, Google provides information about who is contributing (although they do not state what they are contributing); the philosophy behind the project; and how the company views the copyright issues. This transparency follows all the way through to the somewhat flexible design of the search interface itself. Live Search makes none of this help information easily available from the search pages. Microsoft’s product, while being much more opaque, nonetheless has some promising features.

Presentation

While both databases have wide subject scopes, this review is concerned only with the music-related content. When approaching either collection, it is important to remember that a majority of the fully-accessible texts will be those in the public domain (published before 1923). Depending on the wishes of the authors and publishers, works still in copyright may display no text, partial text, or occasionally, full text. Google has four types of availability: “Full View,” where the entire text is viewable, “Limited Preview,” where entire chunks of the book are displayed while others are left out, “Snippet View,” where only some of the sentences with search results are displayed, and “No Preview Available,” where no information is displayed, verifying only that the search retrieved the item. Live Search Books has a simpler system for the viewing of books. The user can limit to “100% viewable” texts, or “See all content.” Next to each result, Live Search indicates what percentage of the text is viewable, and a user who is signed in with a Microsoft Network account can select which pages are displayed.

Microsoft does better than Google at the actual scanning of books. In Google Books, the scanning is uneven, with some pages that are askew or even illegible, whereas Live Search has well-aligned scans, with fewer legibility issues. Microsoft also scans in color, as opposed to Google’s black and white. The difference probably arises from the fact that Google’s project is much larger, and is growing at a...