Re: Google Print Home Page now offers searching

[adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

The limitations on searching and the very cautious treatment of copyright
in out of copyright books (reprints of Henry James etc) are one thing, but
the impossibility of finding out what is IN Google Print is another
matter.

I have found hardly any books which come from the Library-scan route, but
a good many that come from the Publisher-submitted route. Why is Google so
shy of cataloging what and how much it has in the Google Print repository?
I can understand the probably 'political' caution that has led them to
cripple (or at least 'to handicap') full text searching/browsing, but its
odd that Google doesnt have any way of listing or cataloging books; a
total listing, a by-publisher listing, or a by-author listing would all be
useful, indispensible for proper research.

The exact phrase "library of congress cataloging-in-publication" appears
70K+ times in the Google Print repository. Most of the books appear to be
from post 1995 reprints, so I guess that there are at least 70K books in
the collection so far, but perhaps not so many more than that.....if most
publishers have given cip data.

Any views on why Google doesnt catalog its own libary resource? The most
arrogant answer would be that they will not be bothering because they
reckon that sooner rather than later ALL books will be in Google Print, so
it isnt necessary to catalog. Arrogant but daft. A marginally more humble
answer would be that they are waiting for someone else to do the necessary
cataloging: libraries or publishers perhaps.

Adam Hodgkin

On 6/5/05, Dr. James J. O'Donnell <provost@georgetown.edu> wrote:

> The surprising aspect of this is the size and variety of the academic
> collection of humanities titles that is covered by a search here. But the
> absolutely maddening aspect is that this kind of search-by-snippets is of
> very limited use and so cripples the normal function of a "book" as to be
> a form of torture. On a typical search you are allowed to read the page
> on which the search term appears and the two pages before and after. Now,
> in one case, because I know the book, I was able to figure out a search
> term that would probably let me see *almost* every page of the book, as
> long as I were willing to do a cumbersome sequence of clicks to "page"
> through the book. But the natural use of the book consequent to such a
> search -- "aha, he talks about X, so let me look at the context" -- is
> what you can't do.
>
> (That clever link to search almost every page will be defeated because in
> every title, a set of pages has been made inaccessible to display: "As
> part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every
> in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.")
>
> So: if books are collections of facts and the function of a search is to
> find facts, this is almost useable some of the time. If books are books,
> it's a bizarre parody of what scholars and students might actually do. I
> will have to think long and hard about whether and how to introduce this
> function to students.
>
> But it's awfully useful for a new form of autogoogling -- looking
> yourself up to see who quotes you.
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown University