My last post highlighted a new and exciting feature of Google Books - the ability to create your own ‘library’ of google books which are searchable.
I took the time to import a sizeable list of books that I own into my Google Books library. Frankly, I was a little disappointed at how few of my books are available on Google Books. The majority of the books have no preview whatsoever, just the book details! I can’t speak for other disciplines, but it seems that the biblical studies publishers are being a little stingy on the Google Books front!
Now here is why I hope the publishers in biblical studies will start to rethink their position on Google Books: the search has now reached the point that it is going to be very very helpful for people who have already purchased your books. Although my enthusiasm has been squashed a bit, I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to use my Google Books library to do a full text search through my own library, find what I was looking for, and pull the book of my shelf for research. This is such a promising research utility and such a great use of technology. As far as I understand it, it is the publishers that can make this happen.
I sympathize somewhat with publishers on this topic, after all the point is for people to purchase the books, not have free access to them online. But the options in Google Books seem pretty accommodating to me. You can have the whole book indexed, but it can only be viewed in the “snippet” view. This still gives the flexibility of full text searching while not allowing people to read the book online.
So Biblical studies publishers, the ball is in your courts now. Jump on the Google Books bandwagon and you’ll hear the applause of your buyers! Cheers!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:46 am by Danny Zacharias and is filed under resources, Deinde, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.