Google Books

I read the book The Outsiders by S. E Hinton as a school assignment but it shocked me how much I like the book. The Outsiders is the first book I have really liked. Personally I am not much of a reader but when I started reading The Outsiders I could not put it down. The Outsiders is a short read but it is a great read. The Outsiders is in the perspective of a 14 year old boy named Ponyboy Curtis. Ponyboy is an interesting character because he is rebellious but he likes things that other greasers wouldn't, for example books, sunsets, and movies. Ponyboy has two older brothers and after their parents died his oldest brother Darry had to throw away his dream of going to college, and his other brother Sodapop dropped out of school to get a job so that they could stay together. The theme of family comes up throughout the whole book. This theme comes up when they are talking about the Curtis family and their gang and the fact that they stick together after everything that happens. The book also shows you that family is not just blood related, it can be people in your life that act like your family. There are a lot of other themes and great lessons that come from this book and that is why I think it is a great read that teaches you many things.

About 14 years ago I began using Google Books to read books online for some research I was working on. The subject matter of the project I was working on surrounded the 1800s, and Google Books had so many books from the 1800s scanned and on their site to read and download. Today, most of these books and many others that used to be open to public viewing like a library are no longer available to be read. Many have links attached to them now where someone can click and buy the book. That seems to defeat the purpose of what Google was originally doing with Google Books. Not happy about this at all. I don't want to purchase the books I use in my research, I want to read portions of them that pertain to my research like I would at a good physical library. Google Books is no longer useful. I hope they change back to what they used to be. The excuse for the change can't be due to older books having renewed copyrights, because other library sites on the internet, especially some at some large universities, allow free viewing of the books in their original copyright online.

I really loved this book. It has given lots of ideas when speaking to people and it is good fun. I take it on holiday with me when I go to Europe.

I would just like to say what a pleasure it was to use the Wize Books app to order my daughters books.

I liked the idea that everything that she needed was already loaded, it made things so much easier for me.

Also the delivery of the books was prompt, without fuss and well packaged.

I will most definitely use it again to purchase her next batch of books.

Thanks Wize Books

I bought my books yesterday and i was told they will be delivered on the 1st March 2018 but today i am pleased to have received them before ETA :) well please guys, keep it up

I've used these a lot in my studies. I only wish there could be more books with online previews. Could save many students a lot of money

Google turns out to have a lot of free books that they've scanned it. They are all pretty good. It's not as easy to use as Amazon's Kindle site but I think Google has more free ebooks, which is nice. Don't let them charge you though!

The www.books.google.com site is very useful as it has a large collection of ebooks. All the books are proper scanned and written. There is good description of each topic with accurate figure, so that we can learn easily, but there is a difficulty is that the language is somewhat hard to understand...

This website publishes complete out-of-copyright books and selected pages from those in copyright.

Because I do a lot of historical research, I am very grateful for Google scanning and publishing books out of copyright. However there are several gotchas you need to know if doing a lot of research here.

Google publishes the books as 1-bit scanned PDFs, or so some online support people say. The site also creates epub and text versions of the books. The OCRing for the epubs and text is very poor quality, so I never use epub or text. You can download the epubs and PDFs. You can read the text online.

I work on a Mac and use Skim to take notes in the downloaded PDFs. When you save the PDFs with notes, they grow in size by at least eight multiples because Skim converts them to 8-bit or larger PDFs. Preview on the Mac does the same. PDFPenPro leaves them as 1-bit. But I prefer the note taking capabilities of Skim.

Google also scans books still in copyright and publishes select pages on the site. Some of the copyrighted books—plus some commercial reprints of old books out of copyright—have no online pages available.

You can buy books from this Google site. You can purchase printed copies of the books out of copyright. You can also purchase print or epub or—in some cases—both versions of the copyrighted and commercial reprint books.

The online viewing of books is okay, but sometimes a little sluggish and sometimes very sluggish.

Overall, this is very good site for doing historical research because you get the uninterpreted words of the original authors. I was really pleasantly surprised to find copies of some old books written in the 17th and 18th centuries and before.

Mati's review
© May 17,2023
Una historia ambientada en Ceballos (Cuba) de 1929, llena de secretos familiares, momentos duros y la vida de 4 hermanos y de sus antecedentes.
Tres hermanas ( Esther, Eugenia y Carmen) y un hermano, Osorio, cuyas vidas marcadas por muchas desgracias me mantuvieron enganchada durante todo el libro.
Aunque la protagonista del libro es Esther, empaticé más con Carmen, la hermana que siempre está por todos, la que les cuida, les protege y les vigila.
Tanto su madre (Luisa) como las dos hermanas (Esther y
Eugenia) han sido víctimas de violencia machista, una historia que se repite como un patrón y de la cual intentan escapar.
Manuela ( la abuela), una mujer fuerte que luchó por los derechos de su genero en una época poco agradecida por ellas, deseó una estripe de mujeres guerreras e independientes para su familia y creo que al final y a pesar de haber pasado por un infierno, sus nietas lo consiguen.
Hubo momentos muy duros y de mucha violencia que me hicieron sentir mucha impotencia pero la vida es así y, tal como han hecho los protagonistas de este libro, hay que afrontar el problema y salir adelante.
Una historia familiar ligada con la historia de Cuba, un casa, Esmeralda, 4 hermanos con historias desgarradoras y una pluma adictiva, natural y fluida componen un libro que no podrás soltar y leerás en una sentada.
De alguna manera ambos libros de Berenice me recuerdan las peliculas de Almodóvar, muy reales y "crudas" y las recomiendo muchísimo.