Who says Google doesn’t get outside once in awhile? They’re getting behind the new season of Shakespeare in the Park (now playing: Macbeth) with a prominent link on a new Google Book Search page devoted to the Bard.
They’ve collected links to fully searchable versions of every Shakespeare play and organized them by tab according to genre for easy browsing – needless to say, very cool. You can also view “all editions” of each play available on Google Book Search, although most of these are under copyright and in “limited preview.”
The rest of the page is filler; a link invites you to download Google Earth and “take a literary field trip” to the GooGlobe Theater “and other Shakespearean landmarks” – um, thanks for the tip. And a series of links offering “Other ways to explore Shakespeare” just launches basic searches for “Shakespeare” in various Google verticals, like Scholar, Images and News. But this is nitpicky stuff, given the great resource of the plays themselves. Who’s complaining?
Well, just folks who can’t actually access the plays. Bloggers from across the pond are saying that they get bupkus when they click on links to many of the plays, including Phil Bradley, who’s trying the site from the United Kingdom (that’s got to be a 10 out of 10 on the irony scale). Germany’s Philipp Lenssen says, “all I can see when I click on some of the books is a pretty much empty page (with shopping & web search links thankyouverymuch).” We don’t think this quite rates an “et tu, Google?” but it would be nice if everyone could see the plays.
