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Google Book Search and Origami

If you are into origami, then perhaps you have been to the Origami bulletin board at: www.thekhans.me.uk/phpBB2.

Someone posted a question/commentary about Google Book Search on Nov 30th. This lead to a number of interesting replies, and the inevitable “being able to search through a few pages means complete theft!” reply. If people really feel that way, I understand- if you’re an author there’s no problem with you just having your book removed. But to give those responses without thinking about the actual benefits of such a system is a mistake, in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s my reply, which I am posting here because I think it deserves repeating:

I don’t buy into the “this promotes theft” thing at all, especially with regards to origami. Let’s face the obvious here- origami is a niche segment, which isn’t commanding high numbers for book sales. This is fine, and to be expected for anything that is farther down the long tail; I wouldn’t expect books on making wooden duck models or building model train landscapes to be “bestsellers” either.

but what tools like this do is enable us (you know, the purchasing public) to actually FIND books we want, that are on topics we’re looking for. I know that the Google book search tool has already lead me to 2 different books on a topic I was searching on, both of which I purchased through the handy link it provides directly to a seller of that book! one of them was a $48 tome on geometric dissection, which I wouldn’t have even thought of purchasing if I hadn’t been able to peruse a few pages in the general area of my search request.

This is fundamentally no different than being able to look through any book in a book store- you wouldn’t buy a book without even looking at it in the store, would you? unless you know what you’re looking for ahead of time, how could you know the book would be worth buying? or even be relevant to the topic you need to know about?

My long-winded and aimless point is that I think this really is a positive tool for all the hundreds of thousands of smaller authors out there, who are able to put their book in front of more eyes now. They don’t get marketing support or anything else for their books, so anything that gives them more exposure to a reading and purchasing public is a good thing. Certainly if they disagree with that (although all the writers I know are enthusiastic about this product) then they can contact Google and have their books de-listed.

Let’s not knock a tool that helps connect the buying public with the product, OK?

Floor nb 3, treated unryu paper, backlit

mélisande does some more delicious work here, in some white unryu paper. it’s a great swirly pattern with both large hexagonal and triangular geometries, as well as tons of smaller ones (including rhombic!)

the tiny little line in the middle is the wire that holds things in place- she has a fantastic X-ray viewing machine, which works wonderfully (as you can see) for displaying and photographing tessellations.

Time to visit the doctor, I think…

Jane’s hexagonal squashed-triangle-twist fold, close up, backlit

I used Jane’s 3d star fold as the center of this, and then just fiddled with some other things around it. this piece of unryu did not have much MC on it, so the fine triangular squashes didn’t work terribly well- otherwise I probably would have made more of these nifty star collapses.

I don’t think I can stress enough how much I like the design of this solution to the “how do I bring together 6 double pleats” problem; it’s elegant, clean, and efficient.

total size of this paper is about 10cm x 20cm; I still think the unryu paper has promise for detailed folding, I just need to work out the kinks in the hardening process. Progress is being made, though, and that’s the important part.

(description text blatantly cut-n-pasted from my flickr post.)

L. Camargo

I don’t know much more about L. Camargo other than it’s a new blog with a pile of photos of very nice modular origami. I haven’t seen any updates so far, so I guess it’s just a mystery source of interesting photos!

If you are the (spanish speaking?) person who created this site, please let me know! I’m very interested in knowing more about you and your work.