{"id":566,"date":"2009-09-02T12:10:08","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T17:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=566"},"modified":"2009-09-02T12:10:08","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T17:10:08","slug":"google-books-is-so-good-but-imperfect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=566","title":{"rendered":"Google Books is So Good. But Imperfect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I really like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/books\">Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Lots of times, when I&#8217;ve considered buying a book that isn&#8217;t in the library, I&#8217;ve just read a chapter or two on Google Books and made my decision. Or when trying to remember just the way someone described something, I can find the book and read for myself:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of my memory.&#8221; &#8211; Lolita, by Nabokov<\/p>\n<p>Such a great mix of quick humor and evocative metaphor. Thank you google books!<\/p>\n<p>But then, it has its problems. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Googles-Book-Search-A\/48245\/\">this article<\/a>, the metadata is completely unreliable.<\/p>\n<p>That is, if you want to see whether the 1956 edition differed from the 1982 edition, you&#8217;re probably out of luck. If you want to see how people talked about New Orleans before Katrina, look elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Google does show data about the dates of its books, but it&#8217;s all screwed up, as is the category of the book.<\/p>\n<p>An example from the article: &#8220;A search on &#8220;Internet&#8221; in books published before 1950 produces 527 results.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And more:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover&#8217;s Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology &#038; Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama&#8230;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Yikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I really like Google Books. Lots of times, when I&#8217;ve considered buying a book that isn&#8217;t in the library, I&#8217;ve just read a chapter or two on Google Books and made my decision. Or when trying to remember just the way someone described something, I can find the book and read for myself: &#8220;My very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit","category-net-and-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}