Google Books

November 22nd, 2005 | Filed under Technology

While I am generally on board with the idea of Google scanning books so that all human knowledge can be indexed and searchable online, I understand why it is scary for authors and book publishers. That is why it was so nice to see an article giving a somewhat fair look at the situation in todays New York Times. Why I generally don’t like to link to things that require a subscription (even if it is free) I didn’t see this article anywhere else.

In the article the Times quotes Sidney Verba, the director of Harvard University Library as saying:

“Scanning the whole text makes publishers very nervous. I have sympathy with that. They have to be assured there will be security, that no one will hack in and steal contents, or sell it to someone.”

However he goes onto say that:

“The thing that consoles me, is Google’s notion of showing only the snippets, which have everything to do with what’s in the book, but nothing to do with reading the book.”

It is so refreshing to hear an academic, as well as an author, realize that what Google is doing is to allow books to be indexed, not to be stolen. Having recently come out of the academic world I can tell you that some students feel that the only place to research things is on Google, and that libraries are boring. Hopefully this can get students to actually find stuff online, since the content will be indexed not just the author/title/subject, and get them to go to library and check out the actual book.

All in all a good read. Check out the article here.