> The largest truly open library in human history
“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.
Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.
So blame publishers, not Google.
"The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."
Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.
Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
(a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book.
(b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.
Then it would have been hella useful.
More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?
If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.
Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident.
For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org.
I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.
Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.