Google’s Book Search: Not Good for Academia?

We’ve covered the Google book settlement quite a lot recently.

While we tend to focus on how the case affects authors, Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, is looking past the settlement and examining what Google’s massive digitization effort will mean for academics.

“In short, Google has taken a group of the world’s great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.” From misclassifications to publication date errors Nunberg thinks Google’s book search is a “disaster for scholars.”

Update: Jon Orwant, manager of “the Google Books metadata team,” responds to Nunberg (who has inserted comments in red).

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Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and was once given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. Formerly of The Rumpus and McSweeney’s and most recently the founding editor of BuzzFeed Books, Isaac is now the co-host of BuzzFeed News’ Twitter Morning Show, #AMtoDM. He also appears frequently on The Today Show to talk books, and is co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (with Recipes) (winner of an IACP award), and the author of a YA novel and picture book forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He uses Twitter.

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