The Little Professor

Five things that would make GoogleBooks (more) useful (again)

  1.  A coherent policy regarding what is and is not available in full text.  It is not immediately evident why a book published in 1839 needs to be forever cloaked behind a wall of invisibility or reduced to the dreaded snippet view.  At the very least, an explanation would be nice.  Moreover, GoogleBooks' habit of randomly making books unavailable after they had previously been available is inexplicable, not least because copyright is not an obstacle when the edition is from 1842. (Matters are even more inexplicable when your realize that Google's own scans of "invisible" books sometimes show up in full view at HathiTrust or archive.org.)
  2. Searchable libraries.  Once upon a time, you could search your own library, and it was Good.  Then, as your library increased in size, you suddenly discovered that the search function no longer worked at all, and it was Bad.  
  3. An actual quality control alert box that leads to actual fixes.  There should be a way to do something about missing or distorted pages.  (Yes, this would cost money.) And see above: this is something that affects not just GoogleBooks, but other online repositories like archive.org, which frequently rely on Google's scans.  
  4. Logical handling of multivolume texts.  The most common search for a triple-decker goes something like this: 1) look for the title; 2) find one random volume of the title; 3) go into the "other editions" section on the "about" page and try to find the other volumes; 4) discover that one volume is still randomly missing; 5) do a GoogleBooks search for the missing volumes, to no avail; 6) do a regular Google search to find the missing volume (which usually brings it up, and reminds you to skip #5).  Nothing after #1 makes any sense.  The search should bring up all three volumes clustered together (as, hey, archive.org manages to do); it certainly shouldn't have them categorized under "other editions," because, you know, they aren't other editions, they're the rest of the book.  (Having all three volumes linked together would also be nice.)
  5. Have somebody proof the metadata.  As in, not only should publication dates match, but book titles should match the actual book you've just pulled up.  
academic books