January 05, 2008

Quoting from Books Using Embedded Quotes

Some time last year, I posted a thought about Deep Linking 2.0 - What Counts as Fair Use of Online Book Extracts?, where I pondered whether we could start linking in to clips and quotes from books that are at least searchable online, using things like Amazon's Search Inside service, or Google Books.

Anyway, I (think I) failed to follow it up with a post about the Google Books service, announced in early September, that allows you to "highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world" (Inside Google Book Search: Share and Enjoy).

Grabbing the quote is simply a matter of dragging over the area you want to share:

The embed code is a simply a link that wraps an image - like this:

Text not available
Macbeth: A Tragedy, in Five Acts By William Shakespeare

I don't know if any OpenLearn remix materials have demonstrated a proof-of-concept demo of this yet? ;-)

If nothing else, the link back places the quote in its original context, which I'd have thought may be quite useful at times?

PS rather more generally, a new service called kwout lets you "quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map." Using a bookmarklet to pass the page url to the kwout service, kwout generates an image of the web page from which you can drag out "kwouted" area... like this snippet clipped from openlearnigg:

openlearnigg

openlearnigg via kwout

I could see myself using this quite a bit if I trusted the service to hang around... in the meantime, I'll probably stick with Jing

PPS Whilst on the topic of Google Books, here's another interesting service relating to their public domain content - Converting Google Book PDFs to Actual Books with POD service Lulu.

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Posted by ajh59 at January 5, 2008 12:29 PM
Comments

Or... we could use plain text and use cut and paste.

*sigh*

Posted by: Stephen Downes at January 6, 2008 12:25 AM

Tony, thanks for pointing to the Google book quote feature, that was new to me. But the same concern comes up for me as when someone pointed to kwout on twitter - is taking screenshots of pages and linking to them (and as far as I know, linking to the URL as a whole, not the passage itself) what we want/should be promoting? It seems like basic XHTML/divs are already providing rich ground for a heap of unanticipated innovations/mashups/data mining/etc and it seems counter-productive to then go down this path. Maybe it's not an either/or, and techniques like this work when the content provider has not had the foresight to simply provide the content in a web linkable way, but I'm currently pretty leery of posting on these types of methods as they seem to undermine (or at least don't positvely contribute to) some of the practices that are enabling the current phase of web innovation. My $0.02, but I would love to have this perception corrected.

Posted by: Scott Leslie at January 7, 2008 06:52 PM

"is taking screenshots of pages and linking to them (and as far as I know, linking to the URL as a whole, not the passage itself) what we want/should be promoting? It seems like basic XHTML/divs are already providing rich ground for a heap of unanticipated innovations/mashups/data mining/etc"

I think I agree and don't... I'm all for microformats and being able to link in to the body of a page, but I also like the idea of embedding.

If I deep link into the body of a page, that's good; if i link to a screenshot, with a deep link to the source I get to embed the content; if I actually scrape a microformatted div fragment and embed it in my page, the rights police are going to freak ;-) (there's also a good chance the styling will break, which a screenshot/capture avoids).

Ok, so images of text aren't text (though if you follow seobythesea you'll have seen a few recent patents from goog about reading text in images ;-)

tony

Posted by: Tony Hirst at January 7, 2008 07:00 PM