Fazny Zavahir: Google unveils new tool for searching its digitized books

Search-engine giant Google has a new tool for exploring 5.2 million books it has digitized, and not just in English but also Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish.

But unlike its Web search function, this tool, called the Ngram Viewer, goes through the 500 billion words in those books to show trends in word usage. It can determine how often words, or phrases, show up in a given year.

Using the viewer, historians, language experts or anyone with a home computer can track items as seemingly trivial, for example, as when “hep cat” entered the popular lexicon, or when writers generally stopped using the phrase “dying of consumption.”

Historians can determine which of three former presidents — Abraham Lincoln, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson — made the most appearances in print in a given decade. (Washington surpassed Lincoln sometime around 1928 and has remained in the lead ever since.)

Fazny Zavahir: Microsoft Boosts HTML5 Video for Firefox on Windows 7

Microsoft released on Wednesday a Firefox browser add-on extending HTML5-based video on the company’s Windows 7 OS.

The plugin enables Firefox users to play H.264-encoded video on HTML5 by using built-in capabilities of Windows 7, said Claudio Caldato, principal program manager for Microsoft’s interoperability team, in a blog post. Mozilla Firefox is a principal competitor to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser.

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Microsoft has already been offering a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox, for watching Windows Media content, Caldato said. “This new plugin, known as the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox plugin, is available for download at no cost. It extends the functionality of the earlier plugin for Firefox and enables Web pages that that offer video in the H.264 format using standard W3C HTML5 to work in Firefox on Windows. Because H.264 video on the Web is so prevalent, this interoperability bridge is important for Firefox users who are Windows customers.”

HTML5 is an ongoing update to the HTML specification that adds capabilities for multimedia.

The extension is based on a Firefox add-on that parses HTML5 pages and replaces video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plugin, enabling content to be played in the browser. Firefox in some cases might fail to play a video even if the add-on is correctly installed, because a page might use a call to canPlayType to determine if the browser can play H.264 content, Microsoft said in release notes for the extension. “Typically the check is done either using createElement(‘video’) or getElementsByTagName(‘video’) and then call canPlayType(‘video’mp4′). In both cases, the call will return empty string even if the Add-on is installed and the browser could play H.264 videos,” Microsoft said.

Also, the current version of the add-on uses Windows Media Player Plugin APis to control video playback, thus creating differences between methods and properties defined in the HTML5 standard and those in the Windows Media Player plugin. The company seeks to fix these limitations in the next limitation of the add-on.

This article, “Microsoft boosts HTML5 video for Firefox on Windows 7,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter.

Fazny Zavahir: Google launches ebook store with world’s largest library of titles

Is this the end of Amazon’s ebook reign? Google is launching its new open ebook store today, simply called Google eBooks, with over 3 million titles, in a bid to take on the ebook world dominated by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.

As we reported previously, Google’s ebook venture will be more open than its competition. Consumers will be able to browse and search Google’s enormous ebook library, and they can read ebooks on any web enabled device. Your ebook library will be tied to your Google account and will be accessible through any web browser. You’ll be able to buy ebooks directly from Google, or from independent bookseller partners like Powell’s, Alibris and participating members of the American Bookseller’s Association.

Google wisely isn’t relying on the web entirely, as the company is releasing free Google eBooks apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The apps will let users continue reading where they left off when they switch devices, just like ebook reading apps from Amazon and Apple. You’ll also be able to browse and purchase ebooks from within the apps. Google is also providing an app for Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s ebook readers. There’s no word on Kindle compatibility yet, but I wouldn’t hold your breath for that.

The ebook store will also tie into Google Books, the company’s digitization project for the world’s books. Google says that is has scanned more than 15 million books since the project began in 2004 from more than 35,000 publishers. You’ll be able to search through Google’s scanned offerings in the research section of its ebook store.

I don’t suspect that Google will initially be very successful with this ebook venture. Competitors like Amazon and Barnes and Noble are already entrenched in the market, and consumers interested in ebooks are already loyal to at least one of Google’s competitors. But Google does boast a bigger library than the rest with 3 million titles (including some 2 million free public domain titles), compared to Barnes and Noble’s 2 million (with public domain titles) and Amazon’s 750,000 (not including public domain). It’s unclear how Google’s paid ebook library compares to Amazon’s, a company that has had years to form relationships with publishers.

The open nature of Google’s ebook store may eventually help the company grab a bigger slice of the market. You’ll eventually be able to purchase Google ebooks from multiple sources, as well as see them marketed on blogs and other sites on the web. That’s a big difference from Amazon’s Kindle books, which you can only purchase from within Amazon’s store. Google also has the advantage of not being burdened by a device — instead it’s built a system that can work with practically any device.