Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Print

14th December 2004

I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just noticed that Google Print results are now included in any Google search that starts with “books on”. I can’t say I like the lousy discoverability of the interface much—a search box at print.google.com would be a welcome addition—but the results are pretty impressive. It’s also a shame that they’re using a nasty obfuscation technique to disable copying and printing (based on serving book pages up as background images), if only because it will fuel yet more questions from newbie web developers asking how to do exactly that. Still, with today’s announcement that Google are to team up with five leading libraries to scan more books this service is going to get a whole lot more important over the next few years.