14 DAY TRIAL // Google Books is a great product not only because of the convenience factor, being able to read books without leaving your house or your computer, but also because you get access to material it would be close to impossible to otherwise.
The perfect example is the hundreds of thousands of centuries old books available in Google Books.
Google has been scanning these books from the tens of big libraries it partnered with and then digitizing them, making them easy to search through and read.
Google does this by converting the scanned images into black and white copies, to enhance readability and save space. But Google is now offering the option of viewing the books as the originally appeared, in full color.
"Partners, researchers and other readers have frequently asked us to show the older books as they actually appear, for a couple of reasons: First, these books are interesting artifacts," Google explained.
"Second, because of aging and bleed-through, it can be very difficult to display the images as clean text over a white background," it added.
Google is now offering several important works in full color copies and is working on adding more. Google has a list of some of the titles available now in its blog post.
Google Books is a massive and hugely important project that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves. Perhaps that's the fate of all less-than-glamorous projects, but, despite plenty of setbacks, Books is pushing forward as always. The goal is to have all of the books ever written searchable and readable by anyone.
"To date, we’ve scanned about 150,000 books worldwide from the 16th and 17th centuries, and another 450,000 from the 18th century. With our growing list of partners, we expect to scan many hundreds of thousands more pre-1800 titles," Google boasted.