Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books

Via Bernie Sloan on web4lib, Paul DuGuid discusses flaws in the Google Books Project in First Monday, 12(8). August 2007.

"The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable."