One book that is not still under copyright is Charles Dickens's Bleak House, which we will now quote at length (via Wikipedia, so excuse any transcription errors):

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Scan, scan, scan.

Judge Denny Chin expressed frustration at a hearing today about how long everyone is taking to come up with a plan for a settlement between the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers (plaintiffs) and Google Books (defendant). At issue is just how Google will compensate writers whose books it scans while the work is still under copyright.

The 2005 lawsuit alleged copyright infringement when Google Books embarked on its plan in 2004 to scan every bound page on the planet (or something like that -- they're at about 12 million books). They also happened to scan millions of books still under copyright.

The case reached a proposed settlement, which Judge Chin then rejected for its monopolistic tendencies and for allowing Google to post book snippets without first getting the authors' permission. His rejection of the settlement was applauded by Google's competitors, as well as by independent publishers and libraries, but it meant the litigants had to return to the drawing board.

Still no deal! Next hearing is September 15, at which point Judge Chin said he would start cracking the whip. "One thought is to put you on a schedule, give you a deadline," he said. No, not that!

Jeffrey Pang, a software engineer at Google Books, built the new feature. He kept getting requests from friends and family to allow them to browse all the magazines available on Google Books. Before, they had to search for them individually. "Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles," he wrote on the Google Book's official blog yesterday. "The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast."

Users can browse magazine covers or look at an alphabetical list of titles. There's also links on some issues' tables of contents, so users can go directly to specific articles.

Google announced last September that they would add more magazine archives and current magazines online. As they wrote on their blog, if someone searched for "hank aaron pursuing babe ruth's record" on Google Books, they'd find a link to a 1973 Ebony article about Hank Aaron, written as he closed in on Babe Ruth's original record for career home runs. You can read the article in full color and in its original context, just as you would in the printed magazine. "Explore other publications, like Popular Science, New York Magazine, or (for you physics enthusiasts) the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to rediscover historical interviews, do-it-yourself articles, and even a piece on canine eyewear. In many cases, these magazines aren't just history as history, but history as perspective - a way of understanding today."

There's plenty to click through, but here are a few titles and issues we suggest you check out:

Mother Jones' January/February 2000 issue - Read Ian Frazier's tribute to pay phones and how they "recall a commonality in our culture." Or Richard Dreyfuss on how Agent Orange continued to affect the Vietnamese 25 years after the U.S. originally dumped the chemical weapon on their land.

New York Magazine's Dec. 22, 1997 issue - Oh, David Denby on Titanic! MOMA's expansion, Daniel Boulud's Daniel restaurant, Ted Turner's Media Magazine are all there. And, Janeane Garofalo, Leigh Feldman, Jerry Speyer, Stephen Stondheim are featured as New Yorkers of the Year. Ah, the good ol' days.

Best Life Magazine's November 2008 issue - Mark Zimmerman's big profile of Anderson Cooper.

The Rotarian Magazine's December 2008 issue - Judith Diment uncovers the "British Schindler." How Sir Nicholas Winton saved nearly 700 Czech children from the Nazis.

 

In a post on the Inside Google Books blog, product manager Brandon Badger said that ePub was being added to the existing plain text and PDF download options because it will make the books more accessible on phones, netbooks and e-ink readers where PDF versions aren't easily and readably rendered.  "EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or 'reflow') to these smaller screens," Mr. Badger explained in the post. "And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won't be tied to or locked into a particular device. We'll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book."

Downloading a book onto your phone or desktop may seem simple: just type in a title on Google Books and public domain books will include a download link in the upper right hand corner. But these books can be tricky to find--and most of them are in foreign languages. So here's a few of our recommendations for weekend reading, with direct links to the classics for easy downloading.

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Grimm's Fairy Tales
• Extraordinary women: their girlhood and early life by William Russell
• History of the state of New York by John Romeyn Brodhead
• New York 170 years ago with a view: and explanatory notes by Joseph W. Moulton