[GreenKeys] Slightly of topic "Western Electric News"

[dmm at lemur.com]

Pete Lancashire writes about Western Electric News online via Google.

You can also find more issues than Google shows (or at least more
than it shows to me) via The Hathi Trust:

http://www.hathitrust.org/

search on "Western Electric News" 

Unfortunately, there is NOT a way to download entire volumes from Hathi
unless you're within a university which is a member of it (there used
to be, but ... long story).  You can get individual pages as PDFs though.


Pete also wrote (of the Google versions):
>Might be able to download all but have not figured out how.

If you're referring to vol. 6 (1917) and vols. 7-8 (1918) of
Western Electric News, on the Google Books page for each of them
you'll see a "gear" icon in the upper right.  There's a pulldown
menu from it.  One of the options is "Download PDF".

Some Google Books pages don't have this option, even when the text
is clearly public domain and is fully viewable interactively.  In those cases, 
you can use a program called "pysheng" to grab each of the pages.  
It "scrapes" each page off a presentation of the book, and therefore 
the page images aren't as good as those you get via "Download PDF" 
(which aren't that great to begin with), but it's better than nothing.

I'm sure I would never mention in a public forum that it also works
for scraping entire versions of books which are not public domain but
which are fully viewable on Google Books (such as post-1922 Popular Mechanics,
which GB shows under license from the publisher).

https://code.google.com/p/pysheng/

(Aside: I prefer to have pysheng download individual images without
assembling them into a PDF. But if you do this, note that it sets
the image size fields to outrageous values.  Viewing an assembled
PDF through a viewer which pays attention to these (e.g., mupdf)
can result in pages 1 pixel in size!  The solution is to use a program
such as ImageMagick to set -density and -units to something rational.)


I would also recommend the Google Books "Advanced Search Page" over
the "books.google.com" interface:

http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search


Ah, for the days when if I wanted a copy of a digital book
I'd just read it with a TTY-33 and, after reading, still have the
printout.

Regards,
David M.
===
Dr. David M. MacMillan  -  dmm at lemur.com

   The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
       - Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915); Aldo Leopold

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