News from Japan, re: Google Books

[lordameth]

Glad I translated it word for word. In the process, I discovered I'd misinterpreted the entire article first time through

Comments

[atelierlune]

This doesn't surprise me. In a lot of ways and on a lot of fronts, Google hasn't thought their cunning plan all the way through. If enough people pile on about it, maybe it'll start taking some more thoughtful approaches.

[syhd]

Actually, their cunning plan was to leap into book scanning on a massive scale, getting books from whatever readily available sources they could (American academic libraries) and force people to come to terms with a fait accompli, and adjusting to the new reality. If Google had approached it in a more cautious fashion, asking for permission, they'd never have gotten as far as they have. So, in this respect, they attained what they wanted.

Granted, the quality of what they've done ranges from mediocre to highly suspect (image quality, OCR, subject headings), so your point is valid.

[atelierlune]

You'll appreciate this too, so I'll link it here as well:
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/

I really don't see what the point is in pouring money into a tool that is essentially useless if the material that tool delivers, when it delivers anything, is badly scanned, badly indexed, incomplete and confusing. If I were in college and did the 1899 search referenced in the Chronicle article, I'd immediately ditch it and hike up to the campus library, where actual human beings are doing the indexing and the search tools are designed to work.

pocketseizure's point about difficult-to-find books still stands, but what good is a book online versus not if you can't locate it and read it?

[syhd]

Back when Google Books started, concern was raised that it was going to be ONLY Anglocentric. Now the APA wants it that way? Idiots.