Download Squad

Google has been scanning books for the last couple of years for the company's Book Search portal. Well over a million of those books are in the public domain, which means that Google can legally make the full text available online without running into any copyright issues. And this week the company upped the game by creating a mobile portal which basically means you can read any of those books on your computer or mobile phone.

The new Book Search mobile portal is optimized for touchscreen devices like the iPhone or Google Android devices. But you can use it to find and read books on any internet connected device. I grabbed this screenshot using a desktop web browser.

1.5 million books are available to US readers, and over half a million of those books are available internationally. Many of the books are classics that were written long ago and which are no longer covered by copyright. But there are also some newer texts that have entered the public domain for one reason or another.

As Google points out, some of the books may contain errors, since the optical character recognition technology used to convert the scanned images to text is far from perfect. And Google added a neat trick that lets you see the original scanned image when you select any chunk of text.

Have you found anything interesting or surprising in the book list? Let us know in the comments.

Microsoft's newest operating system may be in beta, but it's already getting a lot of praise for providing a good mix of performance and eye candy. Features like the new taskbar, Aero Shake, and Aero Peek make the operating system both visually attractive and easy to navigate.

But you know what? Windows 7 isn't the only operating system with a flashy new desktop interface. The KDE 4 desktop environment for Linux also offers some pretty nifty features like enhanced support for widgets, a new menu, and animations.

So the folks at ZDNet Australia decided to see what people thought of KDE4. Only taking a cue from Microsoft's Mojave campaign, they didn't tell anyone that they were looking at a Linux desktop. Instead they said it was Windows 7. And people seemed to be impressed. Of course, they also only got to look at it for a few moments and didn't know that it wouldn't run MS Office, Outlook, or Adobe Photoshop. But hey, first impressions matter, right?

[via Slashdot]

At first glance, Shutterorg is just another online word processor. Like Google Docs or Zoho Writer, Shutterbug lets you create, edit, print, and save text and image-based documents using any web browser. But there's one thing that really sets Shutterbug apart: You can enter a URL to load any web page as a document and then start editing away.

For instance, I typed in www.downloadsquad.com and within seconds Shutterborg loaded the page as if it were a Word document. You can change or remove images, add text, adjust the font, alignment, or muck up any web site any way you like.

The service doesn't offer a ton of options. Right now you can only save files in HTML format. And there's no way to load documents saved on your desktop, although that feature is coming soon. So right now Shutterborg is really more of a novelty than a replacement for Microsoft Word, or even Google Docs. But this web based processor does show some promise, and could certainly help you plot a practical joke or two.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Of all the unlikely places to curate an art show, the ad space on websites has to be one of the most unlikely. Instead of shocking a monkey or being invited to meet some "adult friends," how about looking at a selection of art that changes every two weeks? The Add-Art plugin for Firefox comes packaged with Adblock Plus, but instead of removing the ads entirely, it displays images from the current show.

Replacing ads with art sounded a bit hokey to me at first, but its the curation that makes this idea brilliant. There's something uplifting about a campaign to take a space in a website's layout, that people were just going to throw away with ad-blockers anyway, and repurpose it to show them something new. Looking through the past exhibits, one of the more interesting projects was curated by having Amazon Mechanical Turk workers select their favorites: a clever, populist approach to art, made possible by the web.

[via Andrew Richardson on Twitter]