Showing posts with label events. Show all posts
Showing posts with label events. Show all posts

Google Books Returns to the Annual Boston Book Festival

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 2:31 PM



Bostonian bookworms curious about ebooks and the latest talented writers are in for a treat this Saturday, October 15th at the third annual Boston Book Festival – a free one-day event celebrating books and authors that's expected to attract more than 30,000 people. We'll be there hosting a Google eBooks Petting Zoo inside the main Boston Book Festival tent at Copley Square, as well as sponsoring two panel discussions.

Interested passers-by to the Google eBooks Petting Zoo will be able to try out a variety of eReaders and tablets and explore the possibilities of reading books electronically on their favorite device. You'll be able to view Google eBooks on these devices from our vast selection that includes free classic titles and new bestsellers.

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Tina Fey Bosses Googlers around

Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 1:42 PM



Last week, Google had the wonderful opportunity to meet comedian and author Tina Fey. Eric Schmidt asked her about her past, present and future, and read several passages from her debut book Bossypants. The new book is a New York Times best seller and you can purchase it at the Google eBookstore.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction explaining the book's title:
"Why is this book called Bossypants? One, because the name Two and a Half Men was already taken. And two, because ever since I became an executive producer of 30 Rock, people have asked me, 'Is it hard for you, being the boss?' and 'Is it uncomfortable for you to be the person in charge?' You know, in that same way they say, 'Gosh, Mr. Trump, is it awkward for you to be the boss of all these people?'"

Fey discussed her road to stardom, adventures in motherhood, and favorite lines from 30 Rock. She even answered live questions from Googlers and fans all over the world, including who her favorite guest star on 30 Rock was. "We've had so many guest stars on 30 Rock. We've been so lucky," she said. Fey called out favorites like Mad Men's Jon Hamm, comedian Tim Conway and former Saturday Night Live cast member Jan Hooks.

Watch the video below, and make sure to keep an eye out for Fey giving Eric a few tips on improv!

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Google Books at the Boston Book Festival

Friday, October 15, 2010 at 3:07 PM



Tomorrow, Sat. 10/16, the second annual Boston Book Festival is expected to attract more than 25,000 attendees to celebrate, discover and learn about books. We’ll be there to celebrate with them because we see books as important keys to human culture, knowledge and progress.

Bostonian Googlers will be there all day, hosting book sales and author signings in our booth in Copley Square outside of the Trinity Church alongside an Internet lounge for people who want to share their experiences with the rest of the world.

We hope those of you nearby can attend the Boston Book Festival -- which is free and open to the public -- and drop by our booth anytime between 10 AM and 8 PM.

Here’s the book sales and author signing schedule. Happy reading!


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On the Future of Books

Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 7:26 PM

Posted by James Crawford, engineering director, Google Books

This morning I’ll be speaking on the topic of the present and future of Google Books at the Europeana Open Culture conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam. Now as much as ever, our shared vision of bringing all the incredible content stored in the world’s books online depends on working with libraries, publishers, authors and book lovers.

Europeana
is a digital library initiated by the European Commission to bring together digitization projects from around the continent. Europeana works with European libraries, archives, and museums to collect and make easily accessible the books, music, film and art that make up Europe’s cultural heritage. It is an important project, and it shows that around the world, public and private bodies see the value of digitization in order to provide broad access to our shared cultural heritage.

To date, working with library and publisher partners around the world, we have scanned more than 15 million books from more than 100 countries in over 400 languages as part of the Google Books project we started in 2004. The greater the diversity of content on the web, the more useful it becomes. And the more people who can access the information cataloged in books, the more enlightening those works become.

Check back soon for highlights from the conference. Read the full post 0 comments

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Introducing Goethe

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 2:00 AM



Today is the first day of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a global gathering of publishers, authors, and booksellers. As the publishing industry descends on Germany, we thought we'd take the opportunity to celebrate one of Germany's best known and most accomplished writers: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Ah, Goethe! When I was a schoolboy, I frankly wasn't so fond of him, or anyone else our teachers forced us to read. In fact, my classmates and I used to grumble about assignments on "dusty Johann," as we liked to call Goethe behind our teacher's back. Well, some things do change as you grow old(er), and now I understand why Goethe is often cited as one of our best German writers. His works and life continue to inspire and fascinate contemporary artists and authors, just as they inspired people in his own time. He was a strong influence on Schubert and Beethoven, both of whom were his fans.

So to celebrate this great writer, we've launched a microsite where you can explore Goethe's life, travels, and books. If you speak German, I encourage you to try it out. Using Google tools, the site lets you follow in Goethe's steps on his Italian journeys, explore his life with an interactive map display, and browse his work, whether it's prose, poetry, plays, or famous quotes. It's a fun way for Goethe fans and book lovers to learn more about Goethe's life and discover who told Faustus to "lay that damned book aside..."

If you don't speak German, don't fret. You can read about Goethe's life in his own words in The Auto-biography of Goethe. Enjoy! Read the full post 0 comments

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Books in Bogotá

Friday, May 04, 2007 at 12:51 PM



Last week, I joined the rest of the Google Book Search team for a trip to the Feria International del Libro in Bogotá, Colombia. As a book enthusiast, I was excited to meet and talk with writers, readers, and publishers from around the world, especially in a city like Bogotá, which UNESCO recently named World Book Capital for 2007. (It turns out Bogotá is the first city in South America to be so honored, joining cities such as Madrid and Alexandria.)

While at the fair, fellow Googler Dan Abbe and I made friends with a guy named Sebastián, who was already familiar with Google Scholar — he told us he used it to research a book about philosophy, power, and the concept of "el filósofo gobernante," or the "governing philosopher." Throughout the fair, he'd regularly steal away to our booth to search for books on Foucault, and every so often he'd scribble down the title of a book he'd discovered, including Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, a book that he found serendipitously. He stumbled upon it while searching for books by Mark Lilla, an author he admires who happens to be the editor of a broader series that includes the book.

We also met Felipe, who recently received his degree after completing a thesis on mobile-phone software programming. He told us it had been difficult to find good Spanish-language titles on this topic, but using Google Book Search, he discovered Java a Tope: J2me. Happily, Felipe was able to find and buy it at a local bookstore, and it became an essential tool for completing his work. (Here's a book on J2me for English speakers.) Read the full post 0 comments

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Some thoughts on books in our digital world

Thursday, February 01, 2007 at 2:52 PM



Not too long ago, we organized Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World, a conference examining how the book business has changed and how it will continue to evolve. Publishers from every part of the industry — some who are already part of the Google Books Partner Program and some who are not — heard from thought leaders and industry veterans who are taking advantage of our increasingly digital world.

One presenter summed it up quite nicely:
The future of the book is secure. It's what we do with it, how we promote it, how we develop it, and how we put new layers of meaning around it in a digital context which becomes extremely important.
From positive posts, like this summary from GalleyCat, to this more critical review from if:book, we've seen mentions of Unbound on a number of blogs.

Want to see some of what Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Cory Doctorow, Tim O'Reilly, and others had to say? Check out this short video of highlights:

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"A book, any book, is for us a sacred object"

Monday, December 04, 2006 at 4:41 PM



Un libro, cualquier libro, es para nosotros un objeto sagrado.
A book, any book, is for us a sacred object.
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Del culto de los libros”/“On the Cult of Books
Last week, the Google Book Search team took a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, to participate in the 20th annual Feria Internacional del Libro, or International Book Fair. It’s just about the biggest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world, drawing book lovers from all over Mexico and publishers from all over Latin America, as well as Spain and even Switzerland, Germany and France. We were happy to be there to talk about Google Book Search with our users and partners.


The fair was a true celebration of books. As much as it’s nice to have access to a wide range of titles in a huge online bookstore, it’s hard to match the experience of wandering through aisles and aisles of books from around the world. Many of the books at the fair won’t appear for sale on even the largest of megasites, which don’t often carry books from small publishers in Mexico, Peru or Cuba.

Borges’ phrase rings true for the experience of the fair, where there were many beautiful volumes designed to produce the most pleasant effects in a reader. There’s something especially gratifying about acquiring a book at a fair like this: you can wind up having a chat with the very person who dedicated themselves to producing the “sacred object” that you’re about to purchase. A sense of Borges’ “us” comes out in these interactions, where a common appreciation of books isn’t so much the impetus for a conversation as its ground. We’re readers too, and we certainly hope to be able to celebrate our appreciation of books with you at more and more book fairs in the future. Read the full post 0 comments

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Hallo Frankfurt

Wednesday, October 04, 2006 at 10:51 AM



Starting today, publishers, authors, and book lovers from around the world will gather in Frankfurt, Germany for the world's largest book fair.

The Google Book Search team will also be there. We've got plenty of things planned for the event, from the launch of The Literacy Project with LitCam and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning to live demos at our booth (it's booth #M904 in Hall 8 if any of you happen to be making the trek). We'll also be roaming the labyrinthine halls of the fair in the hope of talking to as many book lovers, authors, and publishers as possible to hear their thoughts about Google Book Search.

How have we been preparing for our Germany trip? Some of us are reading up on the Gutenberg printing press, which was invented centuries ago at a site not 40 miles from Frankfurt. Others are brushing up on their German literature: the more erudite are picking up Rilke and Schiller, while some of us are sticking to Grimm's Fairy Tales. And me? I'm just trying to brush up on some German vocabulary before I hit the fair. After all, I wouldn't want to confuse wurst with Faust! Read the full post 0 comments

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New resources for librarians and other info-mavens

Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 1:46 PM



Thousands of librarians will soon converge in New Orleans for the 2006 American Library Association Annual Conference. We'll be there (booth #2440), and we're excited to talk with librarians about how they're using tools like Google Earth, Google Scholar, Google News, and, of course, Google Book Search.

In anticipation of the conference, we've just put out our fourth newsletter for librarians. This one turns the spotlight on Book Search, with an article about the project's history, feedback from the library community and a piece discussing a surprisingly popular use of Book Search -- digging for clues about your family history.

We're also excited to announce the release of two new posters, one of which focuses on Book Search. All three posters we've created are available as free downloads from the Tools page of our Librarian Center. If you're interested in staying abreast of new features, teaching tools and other library-related information, make sure to sign up to receive future issues of the Google Librarian Newsletter. Read the full post 0 comments

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Amy Sedaris, Sebastian Junger, Alice McDermott....

Monday, June 12, 2006 at 3:29 PM



Those are just a few of the fascinating people we had the privilege of meeting -- and filming -- at this year's BookExpo America (BEA). Our camera crew spent three days capturing everything from author readings, to people sampling cookies from our "Just a Taste" carts and riding in the Google Book Search Mobiles, to publishers talking about their experiences so far with Google Book Search. Here's a clip of Amy Sedaris reading a few words from her forthcoming book, I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, which she describes as an "entertaining book on entertaining."



If you've read the blog posts and press coverage from BEA but want to see and hear some of the action for yourself, check out the author readings and other videos here.

P.S.: We also have some photos from the expo floor, so if you were at BEA, you might also be here. Read the full post 0 comments

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Photos from BEA

Monday, May 22, 2006 at 8:03 AM



For a book lover, walking through the exhibition hall at BookExpo America (BEA) is like being a kid in a candy store. It's packed to the rafters with thousands of books in every conceivable flavor -- from the latest comic books and manga titles to knitting how-tos, memoirs, mystery novels and audiobooks. As we passed out cookies to entice attendees to try out Book Search at our "Just a Taste" ice cream stands, we met people searching for books on everything from how to repair a kayak to how to deal with personal loss. For me it was an inspiring reminder of why Book Search exists -- to help people discover the rich diversity of the world of books, even beyond the astounding variety that can fit under one roof.

Here are a few photos from the past few days -- stay tuned this week for video clips and more.



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Blogging BookExpo America

Friday, May 19, 2006 at 7:31 AM



Wow. BookExpo America has grown quite a bit since Mark Twain spoke at the first convention in 1902. Expanding from an audience of 60 to a crowd this year of 25,000, BEA is an explosion of activity, and we're extremely excited to be part of it.

For the third year in a row, Book Search team members are here in DC to do demonstrations, talk with authors and publishers, chat with librarians and connect with fellow book lovers. Along the way, we'll post reports and photos from the exhibition hall. So if you weren't able to make it to DC this year, check back over the next couple of days and experience some of the fun right here. Read the full post 0 comments

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