Google Books

Taken from https://www.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about/index.html

Google Books

By Emily Medina

    Google announced it had plans to digitize all the books in the world in December 2004 and by 2007 Google was digitizing books at a rate of 3,000 a day.  Google received plenty of praise and criticism for its plan and efforts.  Many say that Google Books and its function that shows snippets of the text is harmful as it can lead researchers to think they do not need to read the whole text, while publishers reported an increase in book sales even for their backlogs.  Others also claim that Google Books is "hi-jack[ing] Europe's cultural heritage" (author) and that they do not want a private American firm to determine which books the world has access to.  An example of why this argument can be valid is Google's history of censoring websites in China.  The biggest flaw in this argument, though, is that Google does not choose which books to digitize but participating libraries make their collections available for Google to digitize.  There are clearly many pros and cons to platforms like Google Books, such as an opportunity for those who live far from major libraries to access a wide array of texts but also a risk of censorship.  In the end, Google will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars digitizing books to provide free access to the Google Books search engine.

Workes Cited

McShane, Clay. “Google Books.” Journal of Transport History, vol. 28, no. 2, Sept. 2007, pp. 319–643. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ezproxy.palomar.edu/10.7227/TJTH.28.2.15.