google book discovery

For those of you frequently confounded by a) the terrible selection of books available at your university library (let alone standard local library - waste of everyone's time  - especially in Brighton's eco-library travesty) b) the fact that the cheapest you can get the book for is from the book depository or some other third party through amazon, and while it is a pretty good price, its still £16 more than natwest can give you right now:

Google books - is it any use? Sort of.  You can find a lot of things on there, even quite obscure stuff.  The problem of course is the limited previews.  There are ways to try and get more out of it - i.e. resetting your browser/ deleting cookies, making sure you are not signed in to a google account when you use it, switching to a different computer etc.  But these are time consuming and inconsistent when you want to dodge the limits.

Solution?

It never crossed my mind until this week... what about using google books through a proxy?  (proxy websites are sites that allow you to access websites while hiding your computers ip address (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address) - basically the thing that all computers have that give them a unique identity when you go on the internet.  For a long time people have used proxys to do things like go on facebook at work without getting caught, or to look at dirty things on the internet without being found out.  But what, I asked myself, if you could look at BOOKS without restrictions by using a proxy.

Well I put it to the test, and huzzah! I managed to trawl through a preview of a book on google books without any cap on the page preview.  I'm not entirely sure how this works and I need to spend a bit more time working out what proxy sites work best but it seems to do the trick.  The only downside is it takes a bit longer to load each page  - you can't just scroll down from page to page.  This means its not so good for reading from the site, but if like me you take screen shots of the pages so you can print out whole chapters, this is a massive triumph for studying.

I will post again with a proper guide as to how to do this in the near future.


L