Google Books as The Blob that Ate Chicago

I've been seeing a number of articles complaining about Google Books. I must admit when it was first announced I was excited but the few times I tried it I was frustrated in discovering that as you scanned a book whole sections were blanked out putting that content off limits. So, for me, that makes the tool pretty useless. If I can't trust it to give me unfettered access to content then I would rather ignore it than constantly get my hopes up only to see them squashed.

Here's an interesting article by Geoffrey Nunberg from the Chronicle of Higher Education that raises an issue with Google Books that I hadn't seen before:

But even when it gets the BISAC [Book Industry Standards and Communications] categories roughly right, the more important question is why Google would want to use those headings in the first place. People from Google have told me they weren't included at the publishers' request, and it may be that someone thought they'd be helpful for ad placement. (The ad placement on Google's book search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass brings up ads for plant and sod retailers—though that's strictly Google's problem, and one, you'd imagine, that they're already on top of.) But it's a disastrous choice for the book search. The BISAC scheme is well-suited for a chain bookstore or a small public library, where consumers or patrons browse for books on the shelves. But it's of little use when you're flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. 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.

This sure looks like a case where Google obviously has its eye on commercialization while taking its eye off usability.

If you want a good belly laugh, go look at the article it is full of tales of horror about how this tool fails:

The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899) is assigned to Health & Fitness—not a labeling you could imagine coming from its publisher, the University of California Press, but one a classifier might come up with on the basis of the title, like the Religion tag that Google assigns to a 2001 biography of Mae West that's subtitled An Icon in Black and White or the Health & Fitness label on a 1962 number of the medievalist journal Speculum.