Google Print

[francis]

Google have announced a new service (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/08/1097089532009.html?oneclick=true) that will allow users to search the contents of books. Google Print (http://print.google.com/) looks to search books in a similar way that Amazon.com does. If they can pull this off, they might actually get somewhere close to their goal of organising the world's information.

Also Google SMS (http://www.google.com/sms/index.html). Looks like it's USA only at the moment, but a very nice idea.

[Tom]

Google Print is interesting for me. My publishers wrote to me 3 years ago to ask if they could have the electronic rights to two out-of-print books. This told me that I owned them - a real surprise. I put them on the CD I publish this year thinking they would be useful to the students - and more of them seem to be reading them than hitherto. Google Print makes me wonder about stuffing the books with colour photos - I doubt if it would take more than a couple of days - giving them new ISBNs and seeing if Google will take them. They might say they only want to scan from paper.

Another point re Google, did you notice that they are offering to forward Gmail to a POP3 account 'as a free service during the test period'. I'd like to know how much they intend to charge before I become dependent on the service. I am running 2 Gmail accounts at present. Since I don't find them quite as easy to use as I expected I am also continuing with Outlook - and wondering if David has the right idea in paying for anti-spam and only using one account and backing up email on a regular basis. It is less straight-forward than filing paper.

[francis]

They'll probably start charing for POP3 connection at some point. Microsoft havew just announced that they're going to do the same (http://www.internetweek.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47903173) for connections from Outlook to Hotmail - apparently it's a common thing.

As for spam filtering, my ISP has it (on occaisions blocking email I actually wanted) and I also use Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/) as my email client which has spam filtering as well. Very little gets through Demon and what does is picked up by Thunderbird 99% of the time.