I must admit, I couldn’t see much point to Google Books. After all, who’s going to read an entire book online? But now I’m a convert.<\/p>\n
So many of the relevant books in my field are now online that it’s really speeding up my work. For example, I’ve got Neil Mercer’s ‘Words and Minds’ by my side and I want to reference where he introduces the term ‘cohesive ties’. I pull up the book on Google Books, type ‘cohesive ties’ into search, and there it is, highlighted on the page for me.<\/p>\n
OK, not a brilliant example, because Words in Minds is clearly arranged, well indexed and not that long. But Vygotsky! Six massive volumes sitting on the windowsill next to me. Now, in what circumstances did he use the term ‘cultural-historical’? Using the physical books, that’s a\u00a0LOT of work. Using Google Books, it’s a breeze.<\/p>\n
And having the physical books by my side helps, because Google Books usually doesn’t have every page in a book, but it still searches every page. It finds my word on pages 90 and 120 but can’t show me those pages. I pick up the book and flick to those pages. Perfect and complete indexing. How good is that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I must admit, I couldn’t see much point to Google Books. After all, who’s going to read an entire book online? But now I’m a convert. So many of the relevant books in my field are now online that it’s really speeding up my work. For example, I’ve got Neil Mercer’s ‘Words and Minds’ by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}