Rubel Reading - Read books for free through Google unreal

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Wed, 12/07/2005 - 12:56pm.

My mouth dropped open when I read Steve Rubel's entry about "hacking" Google Book search. The idea is that you look at the table of contents in a book, pick a section or page you want to read and then search for that part. As Steve says, "If you're lucky" you will see the pages you want.

Supposedly this works with all O'Reilly and Frommers books, which is incredible in and of itself.

I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that Steve published this method of reading a book. He's into public relations and marketing, and he came out and said he was hoping to get "Dugg" over the post.

There are two things that do surprise me:

The amount of effort someone will put out to avoid buying something is incredible. Heck, the amount of effort someone will put into not going to the library is incredible. It appears that Steve's time is less valuable than, say, $15 an hour. Sure, you can say he's getting exposure out of this, but still. You know those two books aren't the only ones Steve's done this with. He even admits, "I am too cheap to buy the books." I'm going to call this new method of "reading" Rubel Reading. It's the amount of time and effort someone will expend take to avoid buying a book, but in the process costing themselves more than the cost of the book in time and effort.

Google's inability to see this one coming. For a group of smart people they sure do miss some obvious things. I don't know how you'd change this without designing some sort of tracking system, but I am sure publishers will want something done. Some might argue that this is no different than borrowing a book at the library. It's vastly different as it removes the distribution controls libraries have in place. When I got to my library there is one copy of the Podcasting Hacks, so only one person at a time can read it.

I wonder how long it'll take before someone has a program or a script to automate this process? I'm thinking it'll be Grease Monkey and it'll be within a week.