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>I've been fearing they'd take down Google Books Oh that would be terrible. Google Books is extremely useful for academic work: not every library has good text

>I've been fearing they'd take down Google Books Oh that would be terrible. Google Books is extremely useful for academic work: not every library has good text search and I often found myself using Google Books to get reference material I could then look up in the library for full access.

benbreen 9y ago
I relied on Google Books' digitizations of 17th century rare books constantly while in grad school for history; probably more than half of the texts I cite in my academic publications were accessed via Google Books. But lately I've noticed that many of the rare books I relied on are no longer available to read (they're clearly still living somewhere on Google's servers since you can search for snippets, though). Anyone know why this happened? It shouldn't have anything to do with lawsuits related to publishers since the books I'm talking about are centuries old and housed in places like the British Library, which one would think would be committed to making them publicly available. In some cases (like my weird little specialty, 17th century Portuguese apothecary and drug manuals) I'd say the decrease is on the order of 80-90% fewer texts available. Luckily HathiTrust largely makes up the difference, but otherwise this shift would be kind of a catastrophe for me as a researcher. There are dozens of times when I my choices were either "access this rare book via Google Books, or fly to Europe and look at the closest physical copy, which happens to be in some obscure library in Belgium/Lisbon/Rome/Budapest/etc."
clw8 9y ago
I'm just an armchair historical linguist but the 19th century books and dictionaries written by British missionaries dispatched to China, that are freely available in abundance on Google Books, are just as fascinating as the cutting-edge monographs of the past decade. They lacked proper training but their observations are fascinating. For example, the pronunciation guide in a dictionary of Shanghainese notes that older people would say Beiging (I'm going to avoid linguistics jargon and true Shanghainese pronunciation for the sake of understandability) and younger people would say Beijing. So we know exactly when this sound change (palatalization) spread to the Shanghai area. The author didn't call it as such and seemed to have the attitude of "kids these days don't talk properly" which makes it really amusing to read.
- panzerklein 9y ago
  That sounds interesting. Could you provide a couple of links to those books?

benbreen 9y ago

I relied on Google Books' digitizations of 17th century rare books constantly while in grad school for history; probably more than half of the texts I cite in my academic publications were accessed via Google Books. But lately I've noticed that many of the rare books I relied on are no longer available to read (they're clearly still living somewhere on Google's servers since you can search for snippets, though). Anyone know why this happened? It shouldn't have anything to do with lawsuits related to publishers since the books I'm talking about are centuries old and housed in places like the British Library, which one would think would be committed to making them publicly available. In some cases (like my weird little specialty, 17th century Portuguese apothecary and drug manuals) I'd say the decrease is on the order of 80-90% fewer texts available. Luckily HathiTrust largely makes up the difference, but otherwise this shift would be kind of a catastrophe for me as a researcher. There are dozens of times when I my choices were either "access this rare book via Google Books, or fly to Europe and look at the closest physical copy, which happens to be in some obscure library in Belgium/Lisbon/Rome/Budapest/etc."

clw8 9y ago

I'm just an armchair historical linguist but the 19th century books and dictionaries written by British missionaries dispatched to China, that are freely available in abundance on Google Books, are just as fascinating as the cutting-edge monographs of the past decade. They lacked proper training but their observations are fascinating. For example, the pronunciation guide in a dictionary of Shanghainese notes that older people would say Beiging (I'm going to avoid linguistics jargon and true Shanghainese pronunciation for the sake of understandability) and younger people would say Beijing. So we know exactly when this sound change (palatalization) spread to the Shanghai area. The author didn't call it as such and seemed to have the attitude of "kids these days don't talk properly" which makes it really amusing to read.

panzerklein 9y ago
That sounds interesting. Could you provide a couple of links to those books?