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Hello Henry,

Google books does work. You don't really need a high-speed connection, but
it certainly helps. I think if I walk you through a specific case, finding a
book, using it online, searching within it, and then downloading it, it
might help.

Let's start with the process of searching for books. Like anything else on
google, you need to know some tricks. First, we need the home address for
google books so we can bypass all the other google services. It is
  http://books.google.com
Instead of saving this address, I recommend bookmarking the address of the
"advanced search" page for google books:
  http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search
On this page, you can narrow searches by author, title, specific phrases in
the text of the book, and also publication date. Note that these searches
work most of the time, where "most" means more than 50%. Sometimes, for
example, when you request books published before , let's say, 1905, you will
get books published in 2006 because they are part of a series that began
publication before 1905, or because the data record is wrong. Google books
is adding content at an extraordinary rate, and there are errors in the
indexes. But in a way, that adds to the fun. You can find interesting old
books tucked away in "dusty corners" even in cyberspace. Because of this
quirky behavior, I recommend trying various different search patterns when
you're looking for books.

Let's find a specific book. Suppose I'm interested in reading David
Thomson's navigation manual on lunars. Several years ago, George Huxtable
and Jan Kalivoda carried on an interesting discussion about an edition of
this book (it's in the archive: www.fer3.com/arc, search on "Thomson").
Let's update that discussion by seeing what we can find through google
books.

On the google books advanced search page, I type in "David Thomson lunar" in
the box that says "find results  with all of the words" (the top box). In
the date section, I set an upper limit for date of 1860 (I tried 1899 first
 --too many matches). Then click search. The very first item returned is
relevant, but it's just a reference within another book. This often happens.
Many 19th century books included catalogs and indexes of other publications
in the back. These are indexed by google just like any other text. The
second hit, however, is very useful. It's an obituary of Thomson from the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When I click on it, I
immediately see a page from that journal with the search terms highlighted.
This page should appear on your computer within ten seconds even on a
dial-up connection. Note that the page displays in Adobe Reader. It's
important for online documents that you have a relatively recent version of
this or an equivalent "pdf" reader installed on your computer. In the
obituary in the MNRAS, we learn various interesting things about Thomson's
life including the fact that his navigation tables are in an 11th edition
after only ten years in print (this is a clever publisher's trick as it
turns out --they're referring to "printings" as "editions" to boost sales).
As a matter of trivia, I learned from this obit that Mauritius used to be
commonly called "the Mauritius".

Back to the search results list (alt+left arrow key on the keyboard is a
fast shortcut to the previous page in many web browsers), there are several
random hits, another obituary, and then around item seven in the search
list, there it is: "Lunar and Horary Tables for ascertaining the longitude"
by David Thomson from 1845. So we click that...

When a "full view" book opens in google books, it often opens to a page in
the middle of the volume. For me, in this case, it opened to an
advertisement published in the book (interesting in its own way). I want to
look at the title page, so I go to the panel on the right, click "Table of
Contents" and then scroll up within the pages of the book until I see the
title page (sometimes the panel on the right gives a direct link to the
title page but not always). The title page tells me that it's the 30th
edition (his publishers have been busy) from 1845 and identifies it as the
correct book.

Your first instinct may be to download as quick as possible, but it's not
necessarily the way to go. Consider that the entire book has been rendered
by OCR behind the scenes on google. This means that you can search the
content of the book. You can't do this on your own computer unless you have
OCR (optical character recognition) software installed. We can search for
specific words in the book, for example, "Aldebaran". In the right-hand
panel, scroll down a bit to the box that says "Search in this book" and type
in Aldebaran. The search returns three hits (this is the minimum number
since OCR is not perfect, especially with old text). The third hit takes us
to page 58 which gives Thomson's instructions for finding Aldebaran in the
sky. There's a whole section on identifying the bright stars. On that same
page, I thought it was interesting that he spelled Betelgeuse as Betelguese
(twice). That spelling to me indicates that he was accustomed to pronouncing
that star name with a "hard" g (as in get) [try searching on both spellings
in all books in google books... it's a common alternative spelling as it
turns out]. You can do this "search in this book" trick even using long
phrases. For example, type "mean time" (WITH the quotes, to indicate that
it's a phrase) in the search box, and it will return all references to that
exact phrase, within the limits of OCR, in this book.

There are two other interesting links in the right-hand panel. Near the top,
there's an "About this book" link which will take you to some useful info,
worth exploring, and at the very bottom on the right-hand panel, there is a
link that says "Other Editions" and you'll note that it gives a link to an
edition of these tables from 1825. We'll get back to that in a minute...

Now of course, you can read as much as you want online, but it's also very
convenient to download these books and maybe print out sections. I think all
of us on this list are pack-rats, and it's hard to resist collecting all
these books even though they're online at our fingertips. In that right-hand
panel again, up at the top, there's a button that says "Download" and next
to it "PDF - 37.5M". Now that's not a huge download, and most of these old
navigation books are in that size range, but on a dial-up line, it will
still take a while. Supposing you are getting effective download rates of
40kbps, this download should take a little more than 15 minutes. This should
*not* be a problem for any but the noisiest dial-up Internet connections. On
my high-speed connection (well, not really mine --one of my various
neighbors' connections... the air is filled with wireless Internet around
here), this book downloads in about 75 seconds.

After it's downloaded, you can read Thomson's book offline at your leisure.
And if you ever do need to search for something in the book, you can pop
online, us the "Search in this book" function, get a page number, and get
back offline again. It's very convenient.

Let's get back to that "Other Editions" function. Google books attempts to
link different versions of the same book and also provides links to books
that reference the book you're viewing. When we follow the link to the 1825
edition of Thomson's tables, we find that this scan comes from a copy of the
tables at Oxford University and that it was scanned on March 7, 2007. This
gives you an idea how rapidly this resource is growing. Many books relevant
to our little obsession have come online just in the past few months. When
you click the "Read This Book" button, sure enough, it's another copy of
Thomson's tables, the 2nd edition, with some interesting, minor differences
from the "30th" edition (1845). You'll also notice that there's no
"Download" button. Although most of the older books include a download link,
some don't. I don't see any particular rhyme or reason to this, and I think
it's due mostly to the fact that this service is so new. It's also free.
Since no one's paying for it except by meager ad revenues, it is improved
and updated in a rather haphazard way. But I'm not complaining (yet)! It's
an amazing collection of old books.

Here's another book search to try on googlebooks. Go to the advanced search
page (see above) and type in "lunarian" in the top search box. Under author
(sixth box down), type in "Arnold". Then search. And lo and behold, there it
is! Arnold's "American Practical Lunarian" from 1822 which you, Henry,
brought to the group's attention a couple of years ago. Now you can download
a copy so that you don't risk damaging the spine by opening your old copy
(another big advantage of these scanned books).

Finally, because this is a free product, it is also limited in many ways. Of
course, more recent books are protected by copyright, so you can only see
small "snippets" via googlebooks, but they're still fully searchable online.
And many of the scanned pages are flawed. Personally, I find that this is
not much of a problem. Most books are 98% scanned correctly. A slightly
larger problem is that the search functions are based on imperfect OCR. This
is just the nature of the beast, but it would be nice if google could add a
function to search intelligently for similar words. For example, the phrase
"lunar observations" might be rendered as "luner observations". Then again,
in old documents, spelling was often different. As it turns out, when you
search with this apparent mis-spelling, google returns various references to
the journals of Lewis & Clark, who apparently DID spell it "luner
observations" here and there.

I should say this: I use google books each and every day. I get lost in it,
it's so amazingly useful for historical research. So if you have technical
difficulties or trouble on the learning curve with this tool, I can only
encourage you to try again and again and again. It's worth the work.

 -FER
http://www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars

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