Update: It seems that Google have caught onto this scam and now require each URL to have a valid sig value. If you still want to read every page, use the search ‘within this book’ function and seach for chapter - that is if the book has chapter on every page; if not, search for every page number.

Google’s Print service has stacks of books, but they only allow you to read a couple pages from each. Have you ever wondered if there is a way around it? Well there is, I’ll show you.

First off, search for a book that you want to read or search for a book that has a keyword you like, then click on it. You may be asked to log in to your Google account (that is just your Gmail account), so make sure you do that so you can actually view all the pages.

The page’s URL that comes up then will be something like for example: http://print.google.com/print?id=flaI_VVftE0C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1 &prev=http://print.google.com/print%3Fq%3Dhack &sig=83t7h7ECDyD6XRjFII5E6LtV64A for Ryan Russell’s book, Hack Proofing Your Network. What you are interested in is the id part in the URL. So in that example above, all you are interested is flaI_VVftE0C. With that id, you can view any page in the book you like simply by changing the URL.

So to view page 1 of the book, just go to http://print.google.com/print?id=flaI_VVftE0C&pg=PA1, remember to change the id of the book to the book you are actually wanting to read. For page 2 you just change the URL to http://print.google.com/print?id=flaI_VVftE0C&pg=PA2 and you get page 2. You can keep doing that for the rest of the book.

If you want to view the pages before the book actually start (eg: title page, contents, etc.), just change PA to PR in the URL and change digit following to the page number of the preface you want to view. For example http://print.google.com/print?id=flaI_VVftE0C&pg=PR1 would display information about the publisher.