How to download file from my google books

In Google Books at least, perhaps less so with other repositories of textual collections, downloading whole books is a simple affair. All you have to do is simply click on the relevant link within the viewer page as demonstrated in this short (silent) video:

from History SPOT on Vimeo.

There are two links on the page to download the book – the prominent red button to the left of the facsimile, and under the settings menu to the right of the page.

However you will notice that Google Books gives you a choice of download formats:

• Adobe Acrobat PDF
• The open format for e-books, EPUB

Downloading entire books in Google Books (1)

Downloading entire books in Google Books (2)

The Adobe Acrobat PDF format is largely suitable for on screen reading and for printing, while the EPUB format is designed for use in e-book reading software, again for on screen reading (on a desktop machine or mobile device). In both cases the file downloaded contains machine readable text, but – and this is a fairly large ‘but’! – neither format is really all that suitable for use in a text mining context. Ideally the text that we will want to use for our analysis should be plain text, so that it can be imported into the data mining tool of our choice, and subsequently re-structured and re-formatted accordingly.

This means that in our scenario where we have downloaded a book from Google Books, we will need to convert the contents of the file into plain text before we begin the process of mining it. This is not, generally speaking, very difficult to do, but it needs to be kept in mind as a stage in the whole research process, especially if you are likely to be analysing large numbers of books. Conversion into plain text is usually just a matter of opening the file in appropriate software, and then exporting it into a text format (for information on tools to read and convert Google Books downloads, see the further reading section).