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Here is an interesting article updating the status of Google books and incidentally vindicating my view of the project. I would appreciate if everyone would not notice that the article is from the New York Times, the one paper I absolutely love to hate.Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books
Google won't stop until they have monopolized the digital print media world. They won't succeed, or will they? Thousands of libraries across the world wait with baited breath. 🙂
I must say that I, too, am a fan of Google Books. It's helped me when needing to find information from old books and has also helped me when I want to look at citations that otherwise might not be presented anywhere publicly accessible online. The limitation with G-Books, however, is that it lacks a lot of current books one might want to do real research are contained in-whole on the site (I'm guessing for copyright reasons). So in many cases it really needs to be used in conjunction with other forms of research.
Somebody has already sued Google. They announced a settlement a few months ago. Google books will offer copyrighted books as part of a subscription service. Google plans on having something like 14 million title available within 5 years.Lets face it, the internet is here to stay and it is increasingly possible to use it as a legitimate research tool. It does indeed make information available to a huge audience that otherwise only specialists could get to.
If I may hijack this thread and go off topic for just a bit…A few years ago I had the misfortune of using Google Adsense ads on my site, through which I would get paid so much every time someone clicked on a Google ad. With enough visitors to one's site, this can actually be somewhat lucrative. After using the service for probably half a year or more (and already getting paid once), I accrued some $200 through Adsense and was ready to get paid by check. To my dismay, what I got instead was some cold letter from Google claiming that I had violated the TOS. I had the opportunity to respond (which I did), but my appeal was rejected. My account was canceled and my money was gone . I felt like it was a kangaroo court where Google was judge, jury, and executioner. To this day I don't know what I did to have my account canceled. I felt like I was dealing with some faceless corporation which flagged my account for some reason and felt it easier to eliminate my account (and keep my earned money) than even tell me what happened to put me in jeopardy.Anyway, my point is that this provided me with a great lesson: be very careful about how much trust you place in Google (or any company which wants to control your information). I read a story the other day about how Google now wants to offer something like an “online pc”, so that your computer will be accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. The thinking is that people won't buy PCs for their home down the road because they will be virtual instead; what people will need is simply some way of connecting to that virtual PC (at home, work, on their phone/pda, etc). Based on my past experience, how in the world would I ever want G to control my entire computing experience?Don't get me wrong – I still like Google books and other G services, but there is a limit to how much trust I put in any single company.
I agreew with you Phid. I love Goole Books but I doubt that I would ever let some company secure all my data for me out of the goodness 😉 of their hearts. I think what you are talking about are tablets, the company my wife worked for last year is switchng to them. Everything is saved on the server and only executives and management got real PC's. I see two problems with this 1. It displays an inherent lack of trust in employess, and if you don't trust them why hire them? and 2. What happens when the network has an outage? 90% of your workforce can then get nothing done. The army is also talking about using these but I dont see how they can make it workable.
I downloaded Google Chrome the other day to see what all the hullabaloo was about. I'm not impressed with it, but to be fair it was designed to be simple to load quickly (which I don't see any better performance over Firefox 3).
I am using IE8 but I just downloaded Firefox 3.1 the other day to try it out. IE8 seems to run fairly slow on my system so if Firefox is faster I may switch, I am not emotionally tied to my web browser.
