Homeschool Fever

For this week’s Work’s for Me Wednesday (Hosted by Rocks in my Dryer) , I did a tutorial of Google books.

Being an avid reader (and lifelong book lover), I LOVE google books and use it all the time. I get quite giddy even thinking of all the books at my instant disposal. Many people haven’t yet begun to delve into this beautiful little corner of cyberspace though.

Use to be, when you wanted to find a book on a certain subject, you had to wade through hundreds of pages of catalogs or spend hours at a library or bookstore. And that’s just ONE subject. What if you suddenly decide you wanted to learn about the Samarai instead of the Minoans? Or how to baste? Or what games children played a hundred years ago?

Good quality current informational books aren’t cheap, and going to the library takes…well…time.  And isn’t that something we’re all short of?  Time and money.

Well, a few years ago, along came Project Gutenburg, which put “public domain” books on the map with their downloadable Text files and typed out books.  But those can be hard to read, you have to scroll for hours down the page, the formatting is sometimes bad, and the search feature can use some improvement. But still, nothing beats “Free”, right?

Wrong.

Enter, Google Books - a fully digitized library of millions of public domain books on every subject imaginable. With it’s user friendly interface, true-to-life scanned images of actual books, and ability to read from a two-page spread, you’ll feel like you’ve hit pay dirt. Searching is instantaneous as well!

Here’s how I make google books “Work for Me“.  Hopefully they’ll work for you too!

1.  Go to books.google.com.  Just like the regular search engine, you can search any topic on anything.  To search for books on a particular subject, e.g. literature, type in subject: “Literature” (put your subject in between the quotations).  To search for keywords in a book, just type in any string of words. 

2.  You can view books either in list format (like you see in a regular search engine) or “front cover” format.

 

3.  Make sure the drop down box says “Full View Only”.  That way you won’t be bothered with limited previews of books that are only there for advertising.  Almost all of the books on “Full View Only” are public domain and can be downloaded as a free PDF and printed out.

 

4. When you see a book you are interested in, click on the front cover and the book will open for you. 

 

5. It will also jump to the page where your search term is located and it will be highlighted for you.  You also have the option of searching inside the book itself. 

 

6. You can skip to whichever page you want using the box in the upper right of the reading panel.  Or choose to view a dual page spread (read it like a real book), open it up to full screen, take notes, and zoom in.

 

7. To learn more about the individual book, you can click on “About this Book” at the top to learn important publisher / author information, see a few screenshots of important pages inside the book, and various other tidbits.

 

8. If you want to take notes (in your Google Notebook) or blog about a certain topic, click on the small square to the right of the hand icon, and then click & drag the mouse over the area you want to notate.  A dialog box appears asking if you want it in image format (an exact screenshot of that section) or in text format.  Whichever one you choose, your code will appear in the box just below that. 

 

9.  You can add it to your blogger or to your google notebook via the links.  Or, just click on the code, copy, and you can paste it anywhere HTML & text can go.  I use this method to notate important information and write up articles here on Homeschool Fever.  You can view an example of one of my articles that uses this notation method here, in Education and the Use of the Trivium During the Middle Ages.  The image is a screenshot of the book’s cover page (courtesy of google) and the text was taken from a page in the book.

10.  After all that, you can save it to your Google Library (if you have a google account), download the entire book as a free Adobe PDF file, put it on a portable PDF Reader,  or even print it out for home reading.

……So that’s about it.  That’s how I make google books “work for me“.

Go ahead and try it!  I bet you’ll get addicted too.  The only thing missing is the crisp feel of paper under your fingers.

For more great tips, visit Works for Me Wednesday.