"Leon Fisk" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 7 Mar 2009 15:19:57 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Leon Fisk" wrote in message
. ..
snip
I checked through all of my used sources too, they were all
close to $100, a lot more than either of us care to spend
right now


I'll say. g Since it's basically a reference book, this may be a clumsy
way to use it, but it is available on Google Books. You can switch to
"full
page" mode and hit the magnify button a couple of times, and it's quite
easy
to read.

I've done that a few times with other books and wish I could
do it with a few more

It works a treat when you only need a paragraph or two to
answer your question. That feature has sold me on a few
books too. I've been burned a few too many times now buying
books sight-unseen that I wouldn't have had I been able to
peek inside.

There are some old (~1900's) engineering books available in
electronic form. I'll pass along info (they are out of
copyright, not hard to find) if you are interested. I've
been downloading/collecting them as I come across them. If
you use a decent "djvu" reader program they are pretty
decent to peruse.

Someone here put together a bunch of books like that maybe six years ago or
so and sent out some CDs of them. I have one around here; I looked at them
at the time, but I haven't checked them since, so I don't remember what was
on the disc.

That stuff is always interesting and it's tempting to do something with it,
but I've never had the time. Back when I was with _American Machinist_ and
it was in New York, we had the McGraw-Hill library, which contained the _AM_
library dating back to 1877. We had some great old machining books, many of
which I've never seen on Lindsay or elsewhere. Of course we had the old
Colvin and Stanley books (Fred Colvin was an editor of _AM_ at one time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_H._Colvin -- all of his titles are listed
there), and all of Dick Moore's books, plus at least a hundred others. Aside
from the Library of Congress, they may be the only copies around -- at
least, the only accessible ones.

_AM_ was sold to Penton in Cleveland and I've never checked to see what
happened to the library. McGraw-Hill doesn't publish anything like _AM_
anymore, so they may have gotten rid of them. I'll have to check some day.


I haven't been too impressed with the scanning Google is
doing. It may just be the pdf copy being released to the
public, but the quality, especially images, kinda sucks...

Yes, and I suspect it's intentional. They're playing a dicey game with
copyrights and they have a new project going now, in which they had to spend
$7 million of advertising around the world to let authors know that they're
engaged in an opt-out program, to settle a court suit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/bo...20books&st=cse

--
Ed Huntress