Inheritance and Loss? A brief history of Google Books by Paul Duguid, first Monday (Aug 2007)
Book lovers and books specialists are vindicated in this examination of how Google Books handles Tristam Shandy. It's not a happy story for Google Books - technology bungles the job and there is no human on site to correct the problem.
"In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps. First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance.” In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google’s Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved. Then I chose one book to sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google’s approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited. In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google’s ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book."
Posted by Gwen at August 17, 2007 06:13 PM