09.11.09

Google's Book Search

Google's attempt to digitize the world's books and make all the texts searchable is -- beyond the cries of unfair play by Amazon, mountains of copyright issues and concerns of numerous and varied advocacy groups -- an enormous endeavor. Google's rationale is that public domain and orphaned titles should be freely available to everyone and, with a court settlement looming in October, we will all soon find out to what extent such ease of availability will effect readers and researchers. But because of the colossal nature of Google's task, there are bound to be errors. The potential pros and cons have been well-documented, but the more subtle and pragmatic issues of how well Google's Book Search function actually works has not. Thankfully, Geoffrey Nunberg offers an eloquent critique of the mind-bogglingly awful reliability of Google's Book Search as an actual tool to find the book(s) you want.

 

-- Image via The New Yorker, February 2007.