Chris Webb

Wiley author Charles Petzold points out some frustrating limitations with Google Books in a recent post on his blog.

This is not a blog entry by an author who thinks that Google Books is evil because it promotes the idea of free books.

This is a blog entry by an author who sees Google Books as an invaluable research tool but who gets frustrated and enraged every time he tries to use it.

I know there’s a Feedback page on Google Books where problems can be reported. But the problems I experience are so fundamental that the Feedback page seems grossly adequate. In short, Google Books seems to have been put together with a deficient sense of bibliographic integrity, which is a real problem if you’re trying to assemble an online library.

Charles goes on to outline his frustrations in trying to use Google Books as a research tool, and points out the deficiencies that can occur when machines sort, organize and catalog content. This is a problem similar to the one I pointed out recently with the addition of a Books layer in Google Earth.

Charles sums up the problem as follows:

Google Books is not an online library. It’s a massive heap of digitized books and periodicals thrown together with a complete disregard for what these objects actually are and when they were published.

Image: Tall Chris