Google Books – Supercharge Your Maritime Career John Konrad Total Views: 75 July 4, 2009 For the past few years thousands of trucks have been showing up at Google’s campus, discharging piles of books and picking up yesterday’s delivery. In what is now called Google’s Moonshot , the reason behind this strange occurrence was recently revealed…. Google Books . The NY Times gives us the background of the project : Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries, as part of the company’s core mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Beginning in 2002 as a “secret books project,” according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search has become a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws. So what does this mean to the average mariner? Quite simply, instant access to millions of pages of text filled with nautical know-how. To show you the power of this technology let’s take a look at a simple topic, Celestial Navigation . Go ahead and click the link. With one simple search term you have instant access to 3,120 books on the topic. Now try advanced search ! Let’s go a step further. To find books you can search in real time  select “Limited preview and full view” or, to find books you can download, select “Full View only”. Now try American Practical Navigator in the title and include the author (Bowditch)… LINK . 560 editions of this famous text. What the latest edition? Use the date search again and presto… here it is! Now google understands that most people don’t want to learn celestial navigation by reading an ebook, we want the real thing! So on the left hand column google gives links to retailers and  find a library . Since this was developed by google it i