24 August 2010
[Actually, this is a year-old article—which explains why “there is little new” in it. I mentioned it a year ago. --DW, 8/27]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted or linked to a post about the problems with Google Books. But here’s an article on the topic by Geoffrey Nunberg. For those that are familiar with the topic, there is little new in this article, but the parade of errors in the metadata is humorous, if nothing else. And this conclusion of Nunberg’s is spot on:
In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.
While I share many of Nunberg’s complaints, I don’t share the sentiment in the title that Google Books is a “disaster.” On balance, Google Books is an invaluable resource. Yes, Google has gotten a lot of things wrong, and those errors severely limit the utility of the digital library, but the benefits of ready access to the truly vast number of books outweighs the problems with the system.
(Hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily)
