We hope that this page clears up any questions you may have about the GOOPFIC Project. If it doesn't, please don't hesitate to contact us at goopfic@steinbeck.ucs.indiana.edu.
The GOOPFIC Collection focusses on novels, stories, sketches, and dramatic works that are written in English, in the public domain, and available in their entirety through Google Book Search. It does not aim to include nonfiction works, collections of poetry, or literary criticism. (If you want to start up a parallel project for one of those categories, we can give you some tips on how to proceed.)
The search facilities offered by Google Book Search are great for doing research, but they're not so good for finding a book you'd like to read. There's no magic flag to identify a fictional piece, and there's no easy way to browse the collection, especially if you don't have an author or title in mind already. The maximum number of search results is also tightly capped, so it's difficult to do exploratory searches.
These are 12-character sequences that Google Book Search seems to use internally as a unique identifier of a book (PevaAgFszNYC, for example). Because every book has a unique Google ID and they don't change over time, they're the preferred way of identifying a book to the GOOPFIC Project. To find the Google ID of a book that you're looking at in Google Book Search, just take a look at the URL. Embedded in the URL will be a string that looks something like "id=A96faYss96kC"; that's the Google ID of the book.
These are sequential numbers that the GOOPFIC Project has assigned to the work in the collection. Their purpose is simply to make it more convenient for collectors to determine if they've got them all. It'll also make life easier in the future if we're able to offer direct downloads or BitTorrent links for the collection.
We would like to, but downloading a whole book is time-consuming, and we don't want to hammer on Google's servers and potentially violate their Terms of Service by directing high-speed download scripts at Google Book Search. So it may take quite a while before most of the books are downloadable; please be patient and stay tuned.
If you'd like to help out with this part of the project, you're more than welcome to, but we ask that you don't do anything that's abusive to the Google Book Search servers -- it's because of them that we can access this data in the first place. What we would like is a set of JPEG or PNG image files for each book, one file for each page, named so that a standard directory sort will put the pages in the proper order. If you can provide that, please do!
There are two major ways you can help us out.
First, you can identify more works of fiction available through Google Book Search and send along their Google IDs. Finding them can be tricky; we suggest playing around with the advanced search features and including search terms that include "fiction" words such as said. To restrict your searches to works in the public domain, just add the string date:1500-1923 to your searches. (And send along any additional searching tips!)
Second, you can provide collections of image files for entire books, as explained here. Please be mindful of the request not to hammer on Google's servers; they don't have to provide access to these works, but they are, and that's mighty nice of them.
Please direct all of your questions, comments, contributions, and so forth, to goopfic@steinbeck.ucs.indiana.edu.
No. We have currently no formal connection with Google Book Search, nor do we have any access to the Google Book Search collection not enjoyed by the general public. We just love reading old books!Back