GOOGLING THE LIBRARY

WE WILL NOW DIGITIZE EVERYTHING

But Can We Trust Google? And What About BOOKS???!!!

I was way disappointed when I first got on the Internet, over ten years ago. There wasn't much there, for me. No books. I like books. There were a few old public-domain books, most of which I had already read. Not much from the Twentieth Century. There were a lot of libraries online, but you couldn't read their stuff, unless you were a local resident, or staff, or student, or faculty at the schools with libraries. Aaah, the quality of the stuff online wasn't very good, anyway. Hard to read. Scrolling, instead of page-turning. Not the same experience. Still...

Here we had this incredible new medium, seemingly ideal for the written word. But there were hardly any books on it. Now Google is going to put millions of books online. Starting with the old ones, yeah. But they're still wrangling about copyright, and book-publishers' profits, and so on. That may never be settled, completely. We may never be able to read the latest trashy novel or sexy expose online. Not as long as print is profitable. But what happens when online and e-books turn more of a profit than print books? Will there be no more books? I'd miss books.

Then there's Google. They already sell your info & habits to all comers, on their new e-mail service. The idea is to build up a profile of you, and hit you with finely-targeted ads. But, what's the limit on the profiling? And who gets to use your profile? And, what do you get out of it, besides a barrage of spam? And, what input do you have in all this?

Now, imagine if Google does the same thing with your online book-reading & searching habits. OK, maybe you'll just get ads for J. Crew from reading Moby Dick. But maybe the Christian Coalition will start picketing your home or business, thinking you just like dick. Hm? I'd miss books. Like Fahrenheit 451. And Brave New World. And 1984.



"Google takes the competition to school"

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