Re: Something from the New Yorker about Google Book Search

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

And I would add that the BISAC codes may be fine for trade 
publishers but do not function at all well for scholarly book 
publishers. I tried to express my concerns to the Book Industry 
Study Group, which oversees the BISAC code process, some time 
ago, but was told that in order to have any objections taken into 
account, our Press would have to join BISG, at a cost of some 
$2,000, as I recall.  BISG, of course, is headed by Michael 
Healy, who has been chosen to head the new Book Registry 
envisioned under the Google Settlement, so don't expect the BISAC 
code mess to be cleaned up anytime soon!

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


>Grafton, Anthony. Google Books and the Judge. September 18, 2009.
>
>Some excerpts:
>
>"...bizarrely, Google sorts books, as Geoffrey Nunberg and others
>have show n, not by the Library of Congress Classification, but
>by the Book Industry Standards and Communications used by
>publishers to tell booksellers where t o 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