Google Books (1 Viewer)

[Pogue Mahone]

This made me think of the Bukowski archive of poems we have here, although I know it’s a very different legal situation.

But I also thought there would be a very mixed reaction to this topic in general, especially among the small publishers on here.

Let the opinions begin… I have no skin in this game, but I think this whole concept is interesting…

P.S. I have definitely used Google Books for research and have ended up buying books… But I have also found what I needed in the limited search and never bought the book Google scanned...

 

[mjp]

At one time there was a plan to enter all of the published Bukowski text into the database here to allow for the same sort of "excerpt" search results that Google books does.

The problem is bukowski.net is not Google, and those kinds of searches would be very expensive, in computing and database terms. So expensive that I couldn't implement them here without creating havoc (and needing a dedicated database server). You can imagine if every time someone did a database search every book text was searched for a matching word (nearly 1.5 million words, not including uncollected poems) -- it would be slow and probably not as usable as it is now.

If you search a pdf collection of all of Bukowski's books, it can take a minute or more to return the results, so that gives you some idea of the scope of the thing. Not to mention the time it would take to convert all of the work to text, make sure it's formatted correctly and enter it into the database. There aren't enough hours left in my life to take that on.

And frankly, having all of the published work available in electronic versions makes that kind of search here unnecessary.

But it sure would be cool...