search me
Although all of the "Little House" books are under copyright protection (Little House in the Big Woods will pass into the public domain in 2027; the others will follow accordingly), HarperCollins has allowed google to include searchable "Little House" books as part of their BOOK SEARCH program found at http://books.google.com.

Although you can't actually scroll through and read the "Little House" books online (because they're still copyright protected, remember), you can search for words or phrases as found in one or all of the books. Clicking on the advanced search option allows you to narrow your search in many ways; try it! For example: searching for the exact phrase ground cherries in all books by Laura Ingalls Wilder will open an image of the page in Little Town on the Prairie where ground cherries are mentioned. Ground cherry, however, will point you to The Long Winter, where "ground cherry preserves" were mentioned.

There are a few things I don't like about the search feature as far as the "Little House" books are concerned. The main one is that they keep track of your searches, and if you search for too many items in one book or by one author, they cut you off! You're suddenly restricted. So. You can use it, but just not toooooo much?

Another is that if you search for something that appears in a LOT of "Little House" books - the phrase Laura Ingalls, for example - you will be told that there are over four thousand occurances, but they only show you the first handful of them, even if you ask for 100 results. So even if you're searching in one book for something, you might not get all of the results or be able to view them.

Another thing I don't particularly like is that they used different editions of the books; they didn't use one set of "Little House" books to keep it consistent. Little House in the Big Woods is the gingham paperback, and By the Shores of Silver Lake is the trade paperback, for example. Maybe this shouldn't bother me, but it does. I also can't figure out if On the Way Home and West from Home are included in the searchable LH books. I don't think they are...

The last thing I don't like is that there are still all those mistakes in the "Little House" books to contend with. Try searching for the song "Angel Band," which is indeed one of the songs Laura Ingalls Wilder mentioned in The First Four Years. Can't find it? That's because in most editions, the lyrics are written with the words "angel bank," not band. If you don't know that at some point somebody made a typo that's been there in most of the editions to date, you'll never know about the real song. Same for the song "The Blue Juniata." It's not "wild roved an Indian main," but maid. And other little things won't be apparent using this search, like the fact that Laura herself sometimes spelled the family name Harthorn as Hawthorn. UPDATE: It seems that the site is using a corrected version of "The Blue Juniata," but I found that searching for "Lew Brewster" will only get you mention of his name in Little Town on the Prairie. In These Happy Golden Years, his name has been indexed as "Law Brewster." L-A-W. As in most cases, the searches are only as accurate as the person doing the nitty gritty stuff that makes them work.

But... it's a start, and you have to admire HarperCollins for letting even this much of the "Little House" text out of the bag a full twenty-plus years before they have to.
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:01 PM