RE: Google Print Home Page now offers searching

["Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

Replying to David G.'s thoughtful note, but reading several others.  See
his first paragraph first . . .

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, David Goodman wrote:

> Dear Jim,
>
> When used this way as a search tool it is probably closest to think of
> it as an expanded bibliographic index.  Once the book has been
> identified, then it can be obtained through normal sources--one's own
> library, interlibrary loan, etc.

That's certainly the way it operates, but if I *know* that they have full
text scanned and available, to approach it through an interface that (1)
doesn't tell me what's in the collection (Adam Hodgkin's good point) and
(2) that only lets me use the index to each book, but that (3) when I look
up the actual page an index points to, I'm told that I must read no more
than four other contiguous pages before putting the book back, getting up,
walking around the room, and sitting down again, and then to find (4) that
selected pages in essentially every book have been deleted at random out
of respect for copyright law [the same sort of respect that primitive
peoples banging apotropaic cutlery at an eclipse showed to the laws of
astronomy] -- why then I have to think this whole thing is either daft or
goofy, but I'm not sure which.  It will in all likelihood evolve, and I'm
struck by the director of marketing for Google, quoted in CHE last week,
saying that they want to find relationships with publishers that work for
all parties -- they may indeed have a plan, but it resembles nothing so
much as the plan to end the war in Vietnam that Richard Nixon had -- it
was definitely a plan, he just wouldn't tell anybody what it was.  For
now, it's a solution without a problem, a tool that few people are likely
to make regular use of.  Perhaps if they spend a few hundred million more
dollars, it will become useful.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.