Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?
UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive sides is the chance discovery of the public-domain version of lit-blogs (the ‘Chronicle and Comment’ section of 1912 back issues of The Bookman) and the fascinating advertisements of The Reader illustrated monthly circa 1907—defending automobiles, selling talking machines, marketing faux hipster beer as baby medicine and making Grape-Nuts manly. Amazing that “predigested” seems to have been one of the most effective adjectives in the early-20th-century copywriter’s arsenal.
UPDATE II: It’s hard to stay excited about embeddable book clips when Google keeps making adjustments to their index that throw your clippings off and render them incoherent. Screenshots are starting to look good again.
UPDATE III: Eight of the books clipped disappeared from Google’s index 1/24/2008, so this mashup is now a giant screenshot that doesn’t link to anything. Thanks Google!
4 Comments
Ahhh, I love it!
But I think you should the borders off these images. It looks better in bloglines sans border.
Good point. Done.
Uh-uh, them borders are still showing.
Your problem is that the border=”0″ attribute won’t override the border that’s coming in from your stylesheet (HTML 4.0 vs. CSS). Try style=”border:0px;” instead.
I was only trying to appease you and other bloglines die-hards with the first fix, but that second one worked nicely. Thanks style queen.
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[...] But what this sentiment really illustrates is that books are still venerated cultural objects with a lot of power, and that’s what gives good book art its power. Artists like Dettmer excite people precisely because they allow them to see these sacred book objects in shocking new ways. They’re doing more to bring awareness to books than the self-proclaimed Book Protectors ever will. They’re giving old books new life (not unlike Google, another foe of some in the trade). [...]
[...] A year ago I rounded up a fairly big list of bookish social networks. I’ve since tried a number of them (as the list has grown to something like 40 bookish competitors) and was pretty hyped up about Google Book Search until their embeddable book clippings started breaking and I realized their full-text search only covers a small percentage of the books I’m interested in searching. [...]