[Web4lib] Something from the New Yorker about Google Book Search

[B.G. Sloan]

Grafton, Anthony. Google Books and the Judge. September 18, 2009.
 
Some excerpts:

"...bizarrely, Google sorts books, as Geoffrey Nunberg and others have shown, not by the Library of Congress Classification, but by the Book Industry Standards and Communications used by publishers to tell booksellers where to stow a given item."

And...

"...it’s utopian to believe that the company could or would repair the millions of errors already built into the system—or that new problems won’t continue to crop up, as Google vacuums up more millions of books without finding out in advance what book professionals know about how best to identify and organize them."
 
Full text at: 
 
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/09/google-books-and-the-judge.html

Bernie Sloan