From the quality of the posts on this forum I suspect that more than a few people here may have decent gun libraries, so this post may be of interest. Like most collectors, I have a wish list, and I occasionally look for those things. This past summer I decided to once again try and find a decent copy of Modern Rifle Shooting From The American Standpoint by Dr. Walter Hudson, a 1903 book. I addition to checking the book search sites like abebooks, alibris and bibliofind, I did a plain Google internet search and a funny thing happened: one of the results was Google itself. This is that result:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&...1&ct=resultThe entire book can be read online or is available for free download as an Adobe pdf file! pdf is a common computer file format which saves graphical images of the pages, so things like photos are preserved. Apparently, Google has been going around and scanning complete books (some of which are in the public domain) in an effort to create a vast virtual library. They are not looking specifically for gun books and in fact this particular book may have been scanned just because it was in a Boston medical library. Being a curious sort, I then went to the Google books home page to see what else might be available.
http://books.google.com (click on advanced search, upper right)
Here is a list of the complete shooting books available for download I have found so far:
Modern Rifle Shooting From The American Standpoint - Dr. W.G. Hudson - 1903
Our Rifles - Charles Winthrop Sawyer - 1920
The American Rifle - Major Townsend Whelen - 1923
Notes On Rifle Shooting (2nd ed.) - Captain Heaton - 1864
Sporting Rifles and Rifle Shooting - John Caswell - 1920
American Rifleman's Encyclopedia - A.C. Gould - 1902
The Royal Rifle Match On Wimbleton Common - John Scoffern - 1860
First Hints On Rifle Shooting - A.P. Humphry - 1876
Match Shooting With The Enfield Rifle - A Man OF Many Ways - 1866
The Gun And Its Development (8th ed.) - W.W. Greener - 1907
The Rifle Shot's Manual - A Shooting Man - 1876
The Sporting Rifle - Walter Winans - 1908
Suggestions To Military Rifleman - Lt. Townsend Whelen - 1909
The Modern Sportsman's Gun and Rifle - J.H. Walsh - 1884
Hints To Rifleman - H.W.S. Cleveland - 1864
The Rifle And How To Use It - Hans Busk - 1861
Rifles And Rifle Practice - C.M. Wilcox - 1859
The Book Of The Rifle - T.F. Fremantle - 1901
Instructions To Young Marksman - John Ratcliffe Chapman - 1848
Cartridge Manufacture - Douglas T. Hamilton - 1916
Three Lectures Upon The Rifle (2nd ed.) - H.C. Wilford - 1860
Rifle Range Construction - H.C. Wilson & K.K.V. Casey - 1909
The Sporting Rifle And Its Projectiles (2nd. ed.) - James Forsyth - 1867
The Rifle In War - Henry E. Eames - 1909
The International Rifle Match At Creedmoor Sept. 26, 1874 - 1875
Sporting Firearms Of Today In Use - Paul A. Curtis - 1922
Irish Rifleman In America - Arthur Blennerhassett Leech - 1875
I found these books by entering simple search words or phrases like: "target rifle" or "schuetzen", exactly the same way you would do a normal search engine search. The resulting search output pages contain three types of listings. Some are complete books (noted as: Full View), some are labeled Limited Preview (meaning excerpt only) and some are labeled No Preview Available, which I assume means either not scanned or some legal issue. It seems that Google has scanned far more than they are allowed to reproduce whole, but that they can serve up short sections of most books (Fair Use Doctrine?). For them to be seeing inside books they must not only be scanning the books but also using some sort of optical character recognition to read and index the content, which is even more impressive. This is a very powerful research tool and I an just starting to understand how to use it.
The good: price (free!), portability (the files are surprisingly small and you could easily put dozens on a cd), this is ideal for business travel where you would not risk carrying the real old books, space efficiency (my physical shooting library now takes up a wall), and of course you can have them now (no more years of searching for a copy that doesn't smell bad).
The bad: reading whole books on the computer screen is not ideal (there are e-book readers available from Sony and Amazon for $200 or so that may be better), not everything is available, and finally you don't get the satisfaction of owning/holding the real book.
Have fun with it, and come back and share what you have found.
Regards,
1878
