I wrote this guide for the simple reason that I would have loved for it to exist before I figured out how to do these things. Don’t worry about the length of this. It’s an intentionally comprehensive amount of useful stuff you might want to do. You probably don’t have to do it all. Also downloads and installations only have to be done once.

I have Windows 7 and Firefox and this guide is based on that. Probably most of this works in any sort of Windows and maybe even if you’re running Firefox in a different OS. No guarantees though and your mileage may vary.

This is not a guide for getting an entire limited view book off Google. You can only get the pages Google lets you see. Also you can only get those pages as images. If you need portions of text for citation, we’ll get to a neat trick but it’s not feasible for getting a readable text-version of a whole book.

The legality of whatever you’re doing is up to your own discretion. Most likely if you want to copy and distribute an entire book, you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of the law wherever you are. However, most countries allow you to legally copy a reasonable portion of a book for your own purposes.

Let’s get to it!

Do the following things – preferably in order.

1. Open Firefox. If you don’t have it, get it here. It’s the best browser anyway.
2. Install Greasemonkey.
3. Install the Google Book Downloader.
4. Install Flashgot.
5. Restart Firefox
6. Go to whichever book on Google Books you fancy
7. In the upper left corner there should now be a “Download this book” option; click it.
8. Choose the pages you want.
9. Let it work.
10. Highlight all the links to the pages.
11. Right click the selection and choose “Flashgot selection” (or just press ctrl+f2)
12. Choose the folder where you want the pages downloaded. Make things easier on yourself by choosing an empty folder. Preferably one you made specifically for this book.

You now have the book

…but unfortunately Flashgot is stupid and saves it without any file extensions. If you want, you can stop here and just rename everything to .png manually.

1. Don’t do that though. Download and install Extension Renamer.
2. Open Extension Renamer.
3. Select your book directory (the empty folder in which you saved your book).
4. In the “To:” box write “png” without the quote marks.
5. Press go.

All your book pages are now in a reasonable format

…so if you want, you can stop here and just view them in any old photoviewer. Here are some other things you’ll probably want to do:

1. If you want to rename them, select all the files, rightclick on the first one (it should now be called books.png), click “rename,” and type in whatever it is you want all the files to be called ending in (0). Example: Whatever(0).png – Windows should now automatically rename the subsequent files Whatever(1).png, Whatever(2).png and so on.
2. If you want to print the book simply open MS Word (presumably Open Office works just as well), highlight all the files (pages) you want to print, and drag+drop them into Word. Be sure to drag the files with your cursor pointed at the lowest numbered file (e.g. Whatever(0).png). I know it’s silly but MS Word will assume you want the “cursor file” first. Other than that, the program is perfectly capable of arranging them in chronological order.
3. You should now also be able to save the “book” in whichever output format you need – e.g. .doc or .pdf

Your entire book is now in a reasonable format

…but hold on. It’s still in images and not in text. If that’s ok with you, just stop here. However, if you need to cite something it’s a hassle to type it all out.

1. No worries, head over to Free OCR.
2. Upload the image of the page you want to cite and click “send file.” Your image will be converted to plain text.

This also works for your entire book if you saved it as a pdf but unfortunately only if it doesn’t exceed 2MB. There are free OCR softwares out there without limitations. I can’t vouch for any of them though, since I haven’t tried them.

Other useful things you can do

• Download and install WinRAR
• Download and install CDisplay

This is useful if you just want an easy and fast way to read your book on your computer after you’ve downloaded the images. Make sure your images have the .png file extension and are all chronologically named. Highlight them all, right-click, and select “add to “New folder.rar” Name the .rar file something you like and change the file extension from .rar to .cbr

You should now be able to open and read your book as a “comic” in CDisplay.

Download and install Calibre

This is useful if you need to convert your book to some other format – e.g. so you can read it on your Kindle or  some other ebook reader. Calibre can convert both .pdf (see above) and .cbr (also above) to just about any other format. You don’t need CDisplay for Calibre to convert .cbr. Just rename the .rar file to .cbr.

The results might not be optimal since unless you had some luck with one of the free OCR softwares (again above) your book is still just images and ebook readers tend to prefer text.

If, like me, you have a Kindle I’d just go with a MS Word created pdf – no Calibre needed. It doesn’t look great but it doesn’t look worse than most pdf’s out there and it’s readable if you tilt the screen sideways.

“Oh, that’s nothing. You can’t teleport people.”

Excuse me? We’re talking about teleportation here. Actual honest to Pasta teleportation. Who cares about it not being perfected yet or whatever? It’s teleportation. Why aren’t you excited?

Anyway, to get back to my day so far. I woke up and felt like reading some Doktor Sleepless. However, since I am back at the Faroe Islands and we have little to speak of in the comic-peddling department, I downloaded a couple of issues from rapidshare. That’s the future intruding upon your reality again with you having nothing but apathy to greet it with. If the actuality of teleportation didn’t excite you, I wouldn’t expect a global, instantaneous library in which you at any time can access all of humanity’s literature on a whim to get it up for you either. Sure, it’s illegal but so was taping films from the TV onto VHS or music from the radio onto casettes, and that didn’t stop you, did it? Perhaps it did, but it sure didn’t stop me.

Anyway, Doktor Sleepless just told me to check out the album Saint Dymphna by Gang Gang Dance, so in a matter of 5 seconds I had downloaded that as well. Science Fiction I tell you, and I just published my thoughts instantaneously to a potentially world-wide audience.

Image utterly unrelated, yet strangely enthralling. Courtesy of A Tribe Called Möw.

What is technological determinism?

What we have seen is that the development of ever more powerful technologies does entail great risks that this technology may be put to destructive use. […] It is for this reason that pessimistic critics of technology talk about technological systems and technical practices (techniques) rather than about devices. They see these systems as embodying values beyond those which are evident in selection of the ends intended to be achieved by technological means. The instrumental criterion ‘efficiency’ masks the presence of those values. If efficiency is a measure of the ratio of costs to benefits, how costs and benefits are counted becomes crucial; costs to whom, benefits to whom and of what type? (Loc. Cit., p. 21)

It is difficult to characterise the determinist view without simultaneously contrasting it with that of the instrumentalist. It can be argued that instrumentalism naturally precedes determinism in that thinking of technology as determined to an outcome beyond human control emerges from the ever-increasing complexity and systemisation of technological products and the abstruseness of their infrastructure. After all, a hunter-gatherer, who just created a flint-axe is not likely to think that it controls him.

The determinist view is not necessarily that any singular artefact holds any intrinsic political value – although a strong case could be made for the personal computer or the cellular phone – but that with technological artefacts and the framework of interaction between them becoming steadily the backdrop of our daily lives, human beings themselves have become part of technology. Cogs in the machinery as it were.

Pessimists […] tend to treat technological systems as part of the reality within which people live and work; indeed technological systems constitute this environment by functioning to create and sustain it (Loc. cit.).

The classical examples are that of office and factory workers having no choice but to work in accordance with the standards set by their respective machines and the technological environment (Ibid, p. 22). However, to return to the example of the scythe one might easily imagine a scenario wherein it was decided to pour resources into the improvement and production of scythes for increased efficiency and benefit. Yet, a crucial question raised by determinism would be whose benefit we are speaking of – efficiency to what ends? Advancement in the quality and quantity of scythes is not likely to be of any significant benefit to a carpenter. Therefore, even what initially seemed like such an obviously instrumentalist unit could – if seen in a broader context – easily become a deterministic, politically value-laden privilege of one group over another.

The perspective is the consequences of implementing a specific technology into the context of which environmental systems already exist. Therefore – again without it having to always be the case – technological determinism is commonly coupled with pessimism. Not because human beings are necessarily incompetent or prone to use technology for harm, but because they themselves are part of the big technological machinery, which mercilessly grinds its own capricious course into the unforeseeable future.

Seen in this light technological progress will be something to be critical, wary, and extremely cautious of at the risk of inadvertently making a wrong turn into a dead-end alley with no means of turning back from a future in technological bondage. A technological dystopia, where mankind has become enslaved in a spider-web of his own devices. A classical example in popular culture would be the vision of future society as seen in the film The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999).

Important Differences

Since the superficial differences of the two theories should be fairly self-evident by their descriptive features alone, I shall rather focus on an analytical comparison of what I propose would be the advantages and disadvantages in understanding the nature of technology through the lenses of each perspective.

Instrumentalism, unlike determinism, places the responsibility of technological advancements and its consequences squarely in the lap of humanity. However, it does so at the possible risk of ignoring the profound far-reaching and unforeseeable implications technological changes might impart upon our social norms. The advantage is personal accountability and responsibility, the incentive to initiate improvement, and an aversion towards stagnation.

Determinism, unlike instrumentalism, raises awareness to potential dangers and unintentionally malign complications that uncritical acceptance of new technologies could cause. However, it does so at the cost of individual autonomy and at the risk of stunting an experimental approach to the introduction of new technologies, which might have yielded unpredicted benign results. The advantage is critical thinking, a greater understanding of the holistic whole, and an aversion towards naivety.

Since both approaches have both advantages and disadvantages, instead of opting for a single one, I propose a synthesis.

Conclusion

Why must the choice be between optimistic instrumentalism or pessimistic determinism? Why could it not be symbiotic realism? We should not adopt changes uncritically but neither should we halt change entirely and indefinitely. We should not think of technology as a mere tool but neither should we think of it as a leash. Holism and reductionism are different perspectives of looking at the same subject and neither approach provides a complete understanding in itself.

It is my contention that we ought to think of the relationship between mankind and technology as a symbiosis and make use of instrumentalism and determinism in accordance with their realistic applicability in any given circumstance.

I think Isaac Asimov sums this kind of relationship between continued progress and reflected decision-making thereof beautifully in the following passage:

It is change, continuing change inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the word as it will be – and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our Everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved (1999).

It is my contention that a sensible understanding of technology in the modern world requires that we think of human beings controlling technology and technology controlling humans in turn as being equally true.

♦

There’s a misconception that a movement in any direction is progression (Germaine Williams, 1995).

Acknowledgements

My girlfriend, Ása Johannesen, deserves thanks for providing helpful comments.

Bibliography

Course handout:

LECTURE 3: Conflicting visions of technology

Books:

Tiles, Mary and Oberdiek, Hans, ‘Conflicting visions of technology,’ in Living in a Technological Culture. Human Tools and Human Values (Routledge, 1995, pp. 12-31) COURSEPACK

Asimov, Isaac, ‘My Own View,’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Holdstock, ed., (London: Octopus Books, 1978, p. 5)

Films:

Wachowski, Larry and Wachowski, Andy, The Matrix (Hollywood: Warner Bros., 1999)

TV-series:

Rodenberry, Gene, Star Trek (USA: 1966 – )

Musical albums:

Williams, Germaine, ‘Poet Laureate II,’ track no. 11 on Rip The Jacker, (New York: Babygrand Records, 1995)