Confessions of a banned book lover!

The Stage Zero : My Love for books

My love for books dates back to Stone age,i read as many books as possible in school days and gradually developed a habit of reading.When i found out that there are ebook that i can download for free and read on computer ,it was like i was standing before an ocean of free knowledge. All I needed was a method to seive this ocean and filter out the relevant content. Google proved to be the best tool for the purpose and provided me with gazillions of links and titles.

This was the first stage : Discovering Google as a means to satisfy the need for books.

Then one day,I came across Project Gutenberg (If you remember , Gutenberg invented the first printing Press and the first book to be printed was Bible that came to be known as Gutenberg Bible!). This project aims to compile all the world’s literature as a single,searchable archive! But mostly the books were all in free domain means you can find Shakespeare but could not find Paulo Coelho. A book comes into Public(Free) Domain if it has no copyright associated with it or it is an anonymous creation of the author has died 100 (I dont remember exactly..) years ago. But you can not find magazines,comics,computer books ,tutorials and other study material there.

Second Stage : Discovering Project Gutenberg.

Inspired by Project Gutenberg and having studied its shortcomings, I decided to start a collection of my own. Since there was no use re-inventing the wheel, I aimed to collect the books that were not in public domain (means copyright protected!!) and the books that most of us needed (like new authors,thrillers,tutorials,study materials etc etc). So I started my collection . Searched the books on Google ,downloaded them,organised them, If there was some problem with the fonts ,i fixed it . If it was a document, i converted it to pdf. Converted it into other formats like chm,hlp,lit,jar etc etc. I did this for almost two months and had a pretty decent collection when i decided to share it with the rest of the world. This was going to be a big step as i was going to violate some serious copyrights.(I Will get back to it later.)

Third Stage : My Romance with esnips

Having figured that i was going to share the collection, I opened an account on esnips (in 2004) it provided 1 GB free space at that time. The name of the account was “Tarun Reflex” (as usual) . That was the first time i used the handle “Reflex” (‘Reflex’ also has a story behind it that is too personal, will definitely blog on it whenever i’ll feel over-expressive). I started uploading books and books after books.. Soon it grew to be the biggest collection on esnips with more than 10,000 books in 92 organized folder. All of them free to download and share. Most of the major authors were there (As you will find in the list that is given at end of this post).. I had more than 10,00,000 visitors in 6 months. Moe than 3000 comments and hundreds of daily-emails requesting for ebooks. It was also the time when Orkut was just started.

Fourth Stage : Break-Up With esnips.

Efrat Moshkovich. You know him? You better not. You don’t know this guy unless you break thousands of copyright laws.I assume him to be the copyright in-charge of ensips who mailed me about the repeated copyright violations. I was too much in love with esnips to accede this warning by my so-called father-in-law and then one hot morning in July of 2005, I woke on my hostel bed feeling alone & divorced-before-marriage. I was banned from esnips for ever,My all accounts were banned,my email id was banned from future registration,  they even banned the tag ‘Tarun Reflex’!! You can stil find traces of mt esnips account in google’s seacrh result while searching for ‘best ebooks site’.

It was really a bad day! But i still have a new esnips account that is still active and you can find few books here (Besides there is complete collection of Mills and Boon for all those romance lovers.)

Fifth Stage : Heaven behold the faith departed!

By now, I had a personal collection of over 1,00,000 ebooks ranging from fiction to bedas, Comics to whitepapers, science to jokes,biographies to movie scripts, magazines to audio books,study material for IAS,CAT,GATE,GRE,TOEFL,French,AFCEH,EC etc etc.. Books on computers acquired 15 GB alone! As i was interested in troubleshooting and hacking, i had pretty good material on the subject including hacking using Blue Boxes to new tunneling and proxy techniques .. Banned from esnips, i started a new community on Orkut by the name BOOKS AND BOOKS that is still active and growing (Why don’t you join it?). this time i didnt want to take any chances so i decided to send books by email as an attachment. Now there are more than 5000 email ids in my gmail contacts . I have sent 78 ebooks deliveries (containing 8-10 books each in delivery,on average!) Sent 22 Parts of Mills and Boon (approx 15 books in each part.) and thousands of requests. (Check the community for more details).

Sixth Stage : Sharing the Sources.

I have more links to ebooks than i have ebooks. The job of sending books by email is becoming more and more difficult day-by-day. Google changed its way of adding contacts to gmail making it hard to add bulk-contacts.  I get banned for 24 hours after every 500 emails i send , It takes around one week to send single delivery to all. recently i started a new blog for sharing all the links i have collected over the last 4 years.  I gave a seminar on Intelligent Information Retrieval that can be downloaded/viewed here..

However, I am posting my favorite technique here, Its just a single trick for google that will lead you into world of freedom.

This trick is based on simple observation  : Don’t search for books,Search for servers that host the books. In this way you are searching for a wider domain that is specific to the subject of your choice.

Find Apache’s (default) Index page (Apache is a web server)
Try this query:

+(“index of”) +(“/ebooks”|”/book”) +(chm|pdf|zip|rar) +apache

Find a particular eBook file
Try this query:

allinurl: +(rar|chm|zip|pdf|tgz) TheTitle

My Collection Of Books

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A decade on | Google’s Internet Economy | Analysis

It’s the success story to beat all internet success stories.

Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name “Google”.

Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable).

Not bad for a company that makes its money being a broker for and publisher of online advertising.

The secret of Google’s success, of course, is the algorithm driving its internet search engine. In fact, it is so good that it has entered our dictionaries.

People don’t search the internet any more, they google it.

The secret sauce

Some critics accuse Google of being a one-trick pony and warn that competitors, newly emerging and potentially better search engines, are a mere mouse click away. 

But Google’s secret sauce has more ingredients than its clever way of organising and ranking search results.

Equally important is the technology underlying the vast data centres that give Google the scale, speed and efficiency to serve its rapidly growing number of users.

And finally there are Google’s two money spinners: AdWords – which puts relevant advertisements next to Google’s own search results – and AdSense, the revenue-sharing deals that put Google’s context-driven adverts on third-party websites.

The clever thing here is Google’s restraint. It auctions advertising space not to the highest bidder but the most relevant advertiser, making Google users happy and generating more lucrative click-throughs to the websites of the advertisers.

Google’s real ambition

Google may be a money spinner, but the company says it has much more high-minded aims than making a fast internet buck.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims its corporate vision statement.

Note the word universal. Whether high-minded or not, it is this “Google everywhere” ambition that makes it such a successful company.

Over the years, Google has been releasing a steady stream of innovative tools and services – some of them developed in-house, many others bought in from start-ups: Gmail, Google Docs for word processing and spreadsheets, Picasa for picture editing, Google Earth and Maps for location-based search and display of information, Blogger, YouTube’s video service … the list is seemingly endless.

Not that long ago this looked like random growth. But as these services get a more coherent look and feel, the pieces of Google’s puzzle are falling into place.

Every search we do, every tool we use helps Google to gather more information and organise the artefacts of our knowledge society.

The price to pay

Providing an entry point to Google’s search engine at every level keeps feeding our Google habit, and creates a virtuous circle: the more information Google has, the better its search results, the happier its users, the higher the click-throughs on adverts, the bigger the profits, the more money for new “free” services that entice users to surrender yet more information.

It may leave us happy and Google profitable, but is it a corporate disaster waiting to happen?

Messrs Page and Brin may famously – or notoriously – promise that Google “can make money without doing evil”.

But with Google hoarding all this personalised and traceable information in its vast data centres, issues of data safety, privacy, and corporate Big Brothership are looming large.

The chrome Android

Google is expanding because the internet is expanding. The definition of where the internet ends is getting hazy, with devices like fridges, digital picture frames and mobile phones becoming part of the internet-enabled world.

The company’s next steps are already mapped. This week it launched its very own internet browser, called Chrome.

Today’s browsers were built to show web pages, says Google, not to be platforms for complex applications.  Chrome promises to bring stability to our online experience – and the more computing happens on the internet, the more information Google can gather.

Coming shortly is an even more important piece of software called Android, Google’s (Linux-based) operating system for internet-enabled telephones.

Google makes the same business case as for  Chrome: today’s smart phones were not designed for the mobile internet, so Google steps into the breach.

Partner or rival?

The company started ten years ago by two students has the size to do it all.

At the end of 2007 it had 16,800 employees, and is reportedly hiring about 100 new people each week. 

But with Google spreading its wings and complementing more and more parts of our lives, a rapidly growing number of companies in ever more industries have to ponder whether this “search engine” is a partner, a competitor or a destroyer of business models.

Google’s company motto could quite as well be: “Anything you can do I can do better – and for free.”

It leaves even Google’s largest rivals constantly stressed out – whether it is Microsoft (who saw the beta launch of its new browser Internet Explorer 8 overshadowed by Chrome), or ailing web portal Yahoo, which was forced to agree a revenue-sharing deal by outsourcing some of its advertising to Google.

Even the people who happily pay Google top advertising dollar are getting worried. They complain that Google’s dominance could result in a lack of choice, not least since the company bought its way into the world of traditional display advertising on the web, through the acquisition of Doubleclick.

Triumvirate

This is especially true during the current economic downturn. Google expects that its revenue is going to hold up, because its advertising service is highly targeted and its success measurable. It’s the old media with their mass medium approach that have to worry.

And to reassure investors, Google executives are pledging that they won’t fall into the Yahoo trap of trying to turn Google into a media company.

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told Conde Nast Portfolio that “one of the general rules we’ve had is ‘don’t own the content; partner with your content company'”.

But even here the lines are blurring. Is there a lot of difference between “old media” publishing the pictures and videos supplied by news agencies, freelance photographers and their own audiences, and Google News or YouTube?

For now, the Google juggernaut rolls on.

The two founders keep driving the company’s technical excellence, and Mr Schmidt – a veteran of the technology industry – ensures that the money keeps coming.

This triumvirate has made an informal deal to stick together for at least 20 years, says Mr Schmidt.Plenty of time for Google to secure its position as the lynchpin of our internet economy.

Google Lively
https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/exploring-lively-googles-virtual-world/

Google Chrome
https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/downlaod-google-chrome-google-incs-new-browser-review-download/

Interent Knows what you Will do next?
https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/the-internet-knows-what-youll-do-next/

Strangest Sites in Google Earth
https://tarunreflex.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/the-strangest-sights-in-google-earth

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