Not really.  Not yet, at least.  But you discover the strangest things when Googling yourself.  And don’t pretend that you don’t do it from time to time.  Apparently, my MFA thesis is listed on Google Books.

Title: Jersey summer and four short stories (worst title ever)

Author: Brendan Lynaugh

Publisher: Eastern Washington University

Length: 218 pages

There have been zero reviews.  To be fair, it did have a very limited print run of 2 copies.  There does not appear to be anyway to buy the book.  Nor a cover image. Nor a preview.  Google, in its quest to digitally map every book ever printed, certainly seems to be succeeding beyond rational expectations.

There’s been lots of buzz this past month about new things happening in the world of delivering content in electronic form. Here are some of the more interesting articles I read.

Apple and Google are competing to present publishers with the best version of publishing magazines and newspapers on the Apple and Android operating systems. This New York Times article does a good job of comparing the pros and cons of what’s offered. This video—also from NYT—shows what the two platforms look like.

According to the Library Journal, many librarians are frustrated with the current systems available to allow patrons to check out ebooks. HarperCollins putting a cap of 26 loans on their books are not making things better.

The debate over Senate Bill 3804 is heating up. This bill, which would allow the Department of Justice to shut down internet domains they find guilty of copyright infringements, is already supported by the Screen Actors Guild, the Movie Picture Association of America, and the Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, among others. Now, prominent authors are adding their $0.02, like Nora Roberts in this letter. On February 8th, there was a Senate Hearing titled “Targeting Websites Dedicated To Stealing American Intellectual Property” in which author Scott Turrow participated in his role of president of the Authors Guild. So far, there hasn’t been a vote.

 Want to share any other exciting eNews about the ePublishing world?

Did you know that the word “vampire” has been used quite frequently in literature since the 1800s, but “zombie” didn’t really get its start until the late 1920s? How about how often authors forgot the last letter of Shakespeare’s name?

Well, now you (and I and everybody with internet access) can experiment with how often a word occurred in literature through history thanks to Google’s new Ngram site.  (Yes, you get TWO Google posts for the price of one today! )

I’ve spent lots of time playing around with…erh, researching interesting things such as how often the phrase “little did I know” occurs in books. I’m not quite sure how it will fit into any academic research (or how I would fund that research), but it’s still fascinating to note that the phrase was used very frequently in the early 1800s, hit an all time low around 1830, only to peak again around 1850, then decline for a while before holding steady until 2000, after which it took off at an alarming rate.

 I’m not the only one who’s spending way too much time on this site. The blog Jezebel tried it out on different sexual terminology. They noted that there was a decline in writing about “penis” and “vagina” around the Great Depression but then a huge peak in the usage of “vagina” around 1883.

This tool is supposedly developed for academics and Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, reviewed it for that purpose for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Linguistic research is of course very important, but isn’t it much more fun to find out how much more often “tits” are used than “boobs?”

Try out the site and let us know what astonishing facts (academic or titillating or other) you found in your quest for word and phrase usage through the ages.

Google’s bought eBook Technologies.

(No, not patents related to digital text. There’s actually a company called eBook Technologies. Guess they couldn’t brainstorm their way out of that genericism.)

Details on TechCrunch, among others: just follow the link.

What’ll they do with it? Lord only knows.

i haven’t seen marwencol, but the still from htmlgiant’s post reviewing the documentary (about a man whose memory and motor skills were destroyed) makes me want to watch it immediately.

i heart david foster wallace as much as the next bespectacled white boy, but do we really need to read his undergraduate philosophy thesis?  survey says… yes (apparently). columbia university press has even launched a new website in conjunction with the forthcoming publication of fate, time, and language: an essay on free will and the spinning of wallace’s corpse in his grave.  bonus dfw links: michael pietsch’s editor letter to wallace re: infinite jest, and “deleted scenes” from that massive book.

google’s gonna sell you books.  because they don’t have enough money or market share or street cred yet. and never, ever, will.

starting in january, the missouri review will host the best of their archives on the interwebs as part of  something called textBOX.

claudia gonson, of the magnetic fields, blogs about her reading life.

Right around the time when eCommerce became the buzz word of the day, I worked with a girl named Angela at a software firm who contracted out full project teams to companies who had not yet trained their workforce to use web based technology. Angela and I considered ourselves artist, but avoided being the suffering kind by working as technical writers and HTML coders. Our personal usage of the internet was all about access to free information and cool stuff. The projects we worked on were all about how to make money on the web, which caused us to view all profit-interested companies as greedy and abusers of this new wonderful technology. We had a secret catch phrase that we emailed to back and forth and sometimes scribbled on each other’s note pads in meetings: “Use the internet for good, not for evil.”  Our heroes in this emerging technology field were the founders of Google. Their philosophy seemed to be all about using the internet for good. Their mega search engine was free to use and originally had no favorite links in the search results.

Fast forward to 2004. Google is now a huge company making loads of money, a lot of it through their online advertising. They announced that they are going to start a “library project” which involves scanning books from the public domain, creating a huge digital library that can be shared by the masses. By December that year, they started scanning books that were still copyrighted but defended the action by explaining that only snippets are going to be shown online (even though they scan the all pages of every book). Authors started to rumble and a law suit was filed in 2005. Read more »