Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

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Digital Libraries

Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

1/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

Google Book Search: Typical User View

GOOGLE BOOK SEARCH, which is still in beta after several years of testing, offers the ubiquitous Google search box on its home page. It also has categories of books as well as book cover images that refresh every time the home page is refreshed.

Once the user searches for a book and pulls up its record, one of two screens appears, depending on whether the book is under copyright or not. Copyrighted books display a limited number of pages ("snippets"), including the cover and back cover, the table of contents, the index, and some content pages. For Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2006), for instance, Google shares 29 pages of the 256-page tome. But users can pull up a full-screen view of any of the 29 pages, write a review of the book, add it to their online libraries, view the table of contents and some popular passages, search the contents (only page numbers may show up), click through to other editions of the same work, click to sources where you can buy the book or find it in a library (a link that connects you to WorldCat), and read paid sponsor links.

For books no longer under copyright (current criteria: those works published earlier than 1923, such as an edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations published in 1895 [T. Nelson and Sons], or books that the publishers have granted full viewing rights to), the same features exist, though not all include paid sponsor links. For some books, users can view a PDF edition (with download size shown) or view a plain-text version of each page.

When read in full-text mode, the non-copyrighted books allow Book Search users to view a single page or facing pages, simultaneously, and make an annotation to be included in Google Blogger or Google Notebook. Perhaps more helpfully, users can copy a link provided by Google, and forward it to others. When used correctly, that function can take another reader to the same page and a specific clip captured by the original reader with a dashed line marking off the content. Some books even include a Google Maps mashup showing "Places mentioned in this book."

Quality vs. Quantity?

The UC system consists of more than 100 libraries spread across 10 campuses around the state, containing more than 34 million volumes, which inhabit 3.6 million square feet of library building space. According to the UC-Berkeley library website, in North America the holdings of the state university system are surpassed in scale only by the Library of Congress. Just under a third of the collection is housed in two regional facilities, one located on the campus of UCLA serving the southern campuses; and the other in an industrial area of Richmond outside of San Francisco, serving the northern schools. This makes the digital effort easier, since neither Google nor the UC librarians need to scurry from campus to campus to obtain books to scan. Yet it also suggests the possibility that Book Search is actually a project all about numbers over quality-an implication that neither UC nor Google denies.