3 ms·

When I first saw google books and google scholar I thought 'Oh my god, this is amazing, this will change everything!'. I imagined that a decade or two in the f

When I first saw google books and google scholar I thought 'Oh my god, this is amazing, this will change everything!'. I imagined that a decade or two in the future, being able to read pretty much any book or paper I wanted for a reasonable monthly fee. The search functionality was an absolute godsend! Now? Google books has been pretty much sidelined and abandoned. I feel like I've watched the second library of Alexandria burn, and I am heartbroken. My only consolation, is sites like sci-hub and libgen have made textbooks and papers downloadable, albeit illegally. I still really wish I could search within every book.

fossuser 6y ago
I think this is one case where the end of the product is not Google's fault. Books got enormous push back from legacy publishers. They also had trouble with copyright law around orphaned works, but copyright protection increasing over time from 14yrs to 90yrs after the death of the author (and moving from requiring registration to being default) really made it hard for them to do what they wanted. It's a shame that something initially intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" is now used to inhibit it.
GordonS 6y ago
I still find Google Scholar really useful for searching for papers. It only has access to the full text for some percentage of papers, but you can usually find ones of interest in scihub.
divbzero 6y ago
Google Books in 2004 [1], Google Scholar in 2004 [2], and Google Patents in 2006 [3] felt like the golden age of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and and make it universally accessible and useful” [4]. If you think back to the state of the web at the time, those services were expansive in their scope and ambition when they were launched. I give Google credit for continuing to run and maintain them to this day. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents [4]: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/

fossuser 6y ago

I think this is one case where the end of the product is not Google's fault. Books got enormous push back from legacy publishers. They also had trouble with copyright law around orphaned works, but copyright protection increasing over time from 14yrs to 90yrs after the death of the author (and moving from requiring registration to being default) really made it hard for them to do what they wanted. It's a shame that something initially intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" is now used to inhibit it.

GordonS 6y ago

I still find Google Scholar really useful for searching for papers. It only has access to the full text for some percentage of papers, but you can usually find ones of interest in scihub.

divbzero 6y ago

Google Books in 2004 [1], Google Scholar in 2004 [2], and Google Patents in 2006 [3] felt like the golden age of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and and make it universally accessible and useful” [4]. If you think back to the state of the web at the time, those services were expansive in their scope and ambition when they were launched. I give Google credit for continuing to run and maintain them to this day. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Scholar [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Patents [4]: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/