Implications of Google's recent announcement

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I would be interested if anyone would like to share some ideas (baseless
opinions and wild-eyed rants are welcome, too) on the implications of
Google's recent announcement that they (it?) will now be indexing content
from books (with academic journals coming on stream, too, though most news
coverage is about books, inasmuch as there was an announcement at the
Frankfurt Book Fair).

Amazon, of course, has been operating the Search inside the Book service
for a while now.  What intrigues me is that this could be a sea-change for
the quality of information on the Net, since the lion's share of
high-quality content (not all, by any means) is published in proprietary
books and journals and is not generally even detectable on the Net--until
now.  Without getting into an argument about copyright, it seems to me
that the good stuff is going to put the bad stuff under increasing
pressure, with the result being an overall upgrade of Net information.  
Or are my Woodstockian tendencies clouding my judgment once again?

Joe Esposito