Google Books vs Open Library: The Light Beer vs Dark Beer of the online free book reading debate. (At least click on the links, I think they’re amusing)

That’s like comparing apples and some fruit nobody’s ever heard of.” – Maeby Fünke

Well, we’ve all heard of Google Books, at least, it’s been mentioned in class. From the very start, a comparison of Google Books and Open Library shows two rather distinct websites. Google Books (GB) seems to be more user friendly, providing links to genres for both fiction and non, as well as a “random subject” section on the left side of the home page; also colorful, thumbnail links to featured publications. Open Library’s (OL) home page is a much more muted provided few clues as to what it’s all about. It does provide along the bottom, three columns under three headings: “Find Books”, “Build the Library”, and “Develope the Site”. “Build the Library” has a link under it that says “About the Project”, we’ll check that out later. GB does a little less to inform the visitor what they’re all about, providing a link at the veeeeery bottom of the page, and thus requiring much scrolling, that says “About Google Books Beta”. So, assuming, we know what the purpose of GB and OL is, we will continue the comparison…

Wait, we don’t know what they are? Alright. According to the “About Us” page on OL, “Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone! This is an Open project – the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.” So this small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, have built a database with a wiki interface and you can search through the text of over 1 million scanned books. Remember though, they can’t do it alone. GB’s ‘about’ page is a little more succinct, with their main features in bold: “Search”, “Browse books online”, “Learn more — fast”, “Buy the book … or borrow it from the library”, and finally, answering a question that is undoubtedly on everyone’s mind “Where do the books come from?” Well, dear reader, the books come from Partner Program, which allows authors and publishers to their books out there onto the internet, for free by adding them to the GB world. Also the books in GB come from the Library Project, in which Google is “Working with several major libraries to include their collections in Google Books”. Whew.

“Now what about the books themselves?” You may ask. I took the liberty of comparing the same book on both sites to see which site was better for reading books for free without the hassle of going to a real life library. Ick. Well, searching for Harry Potter didn’t exactly yield a free, digitized copy of the book, so I had to go a little older. No, older than that. Ooooooolder. That’s it. Last of the Mohicans! A sure-fire public domain masterpiece that is wholly unreadable, just like everything else he wrote. I’m from Cooperstown, I’m allowed to say that. Also, have you ever tried actually reading some of his stuff? Awful! Let’s go with Mohicans anyway, just ignore what I say and think about the awesomeness of Daniel Day-Lewis.

After searching the title on GB, I click on the first link and am sent immediately to an online copy of the book. There it is, a very simple scanned version, in all of its stultifyingly boring glory. You can scroll down to go to the next page, allowing for easy navigation. Don’t fret, here you go. Now OL is a different story. Well it’s still Last of the Mohicans, but the path to get there is a little different. After clicking on the first link in the search results page, I am sent to an information page, not what I want if I’m in a hurry to be bored to death by the JFC. After a little hunting on the page, I see the “Read Online” button and click on it. And we’re here. An interesting way to show the book. The sensitivity of the scanner may have been set a little high as you can see through the paper and the text on the next page which makes for bad reading. Instead of scrolling you click on a turn-the-page button in the upper right hand corner. This is fine, I guess. I think I prefer the scroll option though. GB also loads the pages of the books faster, so it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

So who wins? I think I’ll go with the mega-group here and choose Google Books. Sorry guys. Here’s a little something to keep you all going this weekend, I’m off to work on my costume.