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Dylan
Dylan

Reputation: 1183

How to sort search result in reverse order of publication date in Google books?

Google books provide sorted by date option on the left column to sort searched books. But the result seems that publication date is in descending order ( from latest to oldest). This may not be fit for finding the oldest if there are thousands of search results. How can I quickly locate the oldest book (publication date is the oldest)? Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 6041

Answers (2)

James
James

Reputation: 1

Google is just trying to force people to get a subscription. Sorting things by date is a basic thing which should already be available. Google books is inherently flawed an Google keeps it this way for commercial reasons. Some archives are starting to digitize books themselves again because of this. Especially books with prints in them are harder to find than others. I do research in printed matter on a daily basis and know what I am dealing with. Hathitrust is a solution to find books, or go to the pages of the archives, they offer better service. Also The Internetarchive is a good solution.

Years ago Google started a campaign to digitize books from all over the world for free. They offered their database to these archives, but NOT a good solution to search within these books. So basically google is saying, if you want to find something, you'll need us and we will charge money for it. I consider this as an unethical way of doing things. These books are property of humankind and not of google.

Upvotes: 0

mathmike
mathmike

Reputation: 1014

There is currently no way simple way to sort by date in ascending order in Google Books. You can work around this by choosing "Custom Range" and trying out end dates until you get only 1 page of results. Unfortunately, you're still likely to run into the problem that many of the books that Google thinks were published a long time ago are actually metadata errors.

Upvotes: 3

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