The number of Greek and Latin texts that appear in Google books grows, evidently daily. I found a great set of Scholia on Theocritus just last week.
Of most interest to textkittens, however, is probably the appearance of Monro’s Grammar of the Homeric Dialect. The pagination mechanism is somewhat nicer than it was a few months ago, and when the table of contents is clear it may be clickable.
And now, the out-of-copyright books can be fully downloaded as monstrous PDFs.
That is an excellent feature! There are a few I had been trying to download page-by-page.
That’s great we can download now- makes google books a lot more usable.
Thanks for the update! 
Oh.
Oh, oh, oh.
Now I know how I’m going to relearn Latin: The Latin Grammar of Pharmacy and Medicine, which has such practice sentences as “Ought he to mix the nitrates of potassium and mercury?” and “He labored with great diligence, and filled, in two hours, a hundred phials with chloroform.” and “The medicated paper is red.”
That’s one of the strangest Latin books I’ve ever seen.
It almost seems like a joke, but it isn’t. Still, there must have been a time when that book was useful: why else would someone write it?
Doctors are encouraged to learn Latin, since so many medical terms have Latin origins. Perhaps this was a book specifically for these medical Latin classes.
For that matter, somewhere there is (or was) a website made by a Japanese doctor which teaches a little Ancient Greek so other Japanese doctors can master their greek-derived medical terms.
EDIT : Voila http://mrad.iwate-med.ac.jp/member/makoto/greek-m.htm
Boohoo, I can’t see it. No preview at all. It seems some books are visible from US computers only.
Ingrid
Is any one else having trouble getting the pdf’s? I’ve tried on two different computers in two different places – one with windows and the other linux. On the windows computer I repeatedly get errors about the documents being damaged. I can see many, but not all of the pages of each. On linux the pdf files cause evince, kghostviewer and kpdf all to crash.
On an eMac, OS 10.3.9, with Firefox 1.5.0.6, I am getting the pdfs just fine.
WB
On my macbook pro (OSX 10.4.7) my preferred pdf viewer Preview crashes when I open the pdf I downloaded. Acrobat 7.0.8 works however.
It says on the google.book site that there are no known issues with Preview, but obviously there are.
Adelheid, you remind me that I should have added I’m using Acrobat Reader 7.0.1. Interestingly, when I try to open a newly downoladed pdf in Acrobat 5.0, it won’t open. I get only some pages - the rest are blank.
Perhaps those people opening the pdfs should try using Acrobat Reader 7 if they are not already. (I think it’s available as a free download.)
WB
Yes, it is a free download. Google states that a high level of compression is used in the pdf’s. I suppose only the latest versions of Acrobat Reader will be able to deal with that.
I remember that the pdf’s on textkit were also compressed at a certain time: Preview couldn’t handle those either, and only Acrobat Reader 5.0 could (if memory serves me well).
I’ve been using Acrobat 5 b/c I have the real program (not just the reader). I guess I’ll try to run the 7 reader. I’m not happy that all of my linux programs are failing on them, though. I’ll look and see if any of them have new updates.
Thanks,
Ed
Most books download fine. But I have found a few that cause Preview to crash, in which case Acroread works fine.
Is it just me or do other Textkitters find the Google book search engine a bit, well…, clunky! Why not use the good old Dewey system for indexing all non fiction books? Anyone who uses a library regularly can handle this, especially as most libraries have an electronic catalog these days. I can find a book in Adelaide University’s library (a huge collection spread over several levels) in about 20 seconds using their catalog. Somehow Google has turned a simple job into a mystery treasure hunt. It is very difficult to browse for a book, you have to know exactly what you want. And if you knew that then why bother using Google Book search?
how does this work? I don’t see a download link on the book I want… but it’s a “full view” one, so shouldn’t it be downloadable?
edit: nevermind, I figured it out.
hey William, here’s one you’d like!
http://books.google.com/books?vid=03ubwT96ZwdyqWjQ&id=oLPXX1RWgnUC&pg=PA455&lpg=PA455&dq=latin&as_brr=1
(this is fun…