# Getgbook ## TOS Google's terms of service are ambiguous. On the one hand they forbid using anything but a browser to access their sites. This is absurd and ruinous. On the other hand, however, they state that one should abide by the rules of robots.txt, which are only relevant for non-browser access. A reasonable interpretation would be that non-browsers are allowed to access Google's services as long as they abide by robots.txt See section 5.3 of http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS. ## robots.txt Their robots.txt allows certain book URLs, but disallows others. We use three types of URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=&pg=&jscmd=click3 http://books.google.com/books?id=&pg=&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en& robots.txt disallows /books?*jscmd=* and /books?*pg=*. However, Google consider Allow statements to overrule disallow statements if they are longer. And they happen to allow /books?*q=subject:*. So, we append that to the urls (it has no effect on them), and we are obeying robots.txt Details on how Google interprets robots.txt are at http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_txt.html