british

Google Books has an ambitious mission statement: "Google Books is an effort to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable online."

That's a tall order, but the company will make a dent in it with a new agreement to scan 250,000 books from the British Library.

The books, pamphlets, and periodicals are all out of copyright and come from between 1700 and 1870. This is a nice companion project to the British Library's new 19th Century Books app that will eventually put thousands of old books on your iPad.

To put it in perspective, these books were generated during some famous events you may have heard of, including the French Revolution, the invention of rail travel, and the end of slavery. Google will foot the cost for this mammoth digitizing effort.

The digitized books will be available free online through Google Books and the British Library site. Readers will be able to view, copy, and share the text for non-commercial uses.

I'm most looking forward to reading "De Natuurlyke Historie van den Hippopotamus of het Rivierpaard" from 1775. That translates to "The Natural History of the Hippopotamus, or River Horse." According to the British Library, this rare tome includes the story of a stuffed hippopotamus that belonged to the Prince of Orange. Awesome.… Read more

Retro is cool when it comes to the iPad. You can turn it into a tabletop arcade console. You can disguise it as an old book. You can even run a DOS emulator on it.

The British Library gets on the bandwagon with the 19th Century Books iPad app. It goes retro. Way retro. All the way back to the 1800s retro.

The free app features a collection of 1,000 books ranging from historical adventures to travelogues to poetry and fiction. All are from the public domain. Plans are for a paid collection, with more than 60,000 titles to be made available later in the year.

The app includes such little-known works as "A Wild Sheep Chase" from 1894 and "Fables for the Female Sex," as well as established classics such as "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and "The Invisible Man."

The British Library didn't go the usual e-book route for this app. The books are captured as scanned images that show all the colorful covers, aged pages, and nuanced illustrations. It really is the next best thing to having an actual book in your hand.

There is plenty here for bibliophiles, historians, and Thomas Hardy fans to get excited about. More casual readers can marvel at the illustrations and use of the word "alas."

You can search titles, but you can't search through the actual texts. You'll have to pretend like you're in a real library and take the time to browse the books. Alas, this is still a pretty sweet app for book lovers.… Read more

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Google launches an online quarterly magazine

Apple pulls an app that offended many people by claiming it could "cure" homosexuality

The new Ford Focus will use AT&T Wireless to send and receive car data

The New York Times asks Twitter to remove an account that gives a free feed of its articles in preparation for its paywall

The music from the upcoming British royal wedding will be available for download just hours after the ceremony

Research In Motion agrees to disallow … Read more

Apple has been accused by a coalition of 36 Chinese environmental groups of ignoring hazardous and unhealthy conditions at the factories in China where its components are assembled.

Released yesterday by the Institute of Environmental and Public Affairs (IPE), the report "The Other Side of Apple" ranked the iPhone maker dead last among 29 other tech companies for their responsiveness to health and environmental concerns in China.

Specifically, the report claims that Apple ignored concerns at Wintek, a factory that makes touch screens for the iPhone and iPad as well as components for other companies. Wintek came under … Read more

Injecting some high-brow culture into a smartphone realm more characterized by people texting at dinner and playing video games on the subway, the British Library has released an application to allow exploration of some of its collection.

OK, so perhaps it won't mean people rushing to read Beowulf in the original Old English from 1,000 years ago. But it's nice to know the option is there, and the application comes with commentary from experts such as a video on Beowulf by linguist David Crystal.

In any event, it is encouraging at least to this history and museum … Read more

The Diocese of London official biography for Peter Broadbent, bishop of Willesden, explains that the man of the cloth is a season-ticket-holding football fan who appreciates good beer, so he sounds like an upstanding gentleman.

But according to a number of U.K. news outlets, Broadbent is treading in some very unholy waters these days after making remarks on Facebook about the impending nuptials of Prince William and fiancee Kate Middleton, in which he referred to the events surrounding their April 2011 wedding as "nauseating tosh," compared the couple to "shallow celebrities," and predicted the marriage … Read more

BP moved ships and workers back to a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a storm diminished on Saturday, but work to permanently seal the blown-out well could be delayed at least a week.

Ships and rigs working to drill a relief well intended to halt the leak for good were expected back in place on Sunday, but reconnecting the piping to the well could delay the operation seven to nine days, officials said.

Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, head of the U.S. spill response, said the launch of a "static kill" operation to plug the … Read more

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON--His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former longtime Russian minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says, nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and … Read more

For years, file sharers have wondered why copyright owners don't go after Google, when the search engine is as effective at finding pirated film and music content as The Pirate Bay or any other BitTorrent search engine.

It seems as if someone at the British Phonographic Industry must have wondered about that too, as the trade group for the music industry in Great Britain has requested that Google remove links to some popular file-sharing sites, including Megaupload, 4shared.com, Zippyshare, and MediaFire.

"We have identified the following links that are available via Google's search engine," the … Read more