Sunday, November 20th, 2005, 5:10 pm
Google’s Book Search (Formerly ‘Print’)
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am not entirely sure how long Google Print (renamed Book Search) has actually been up for. I have just carried out a standard Google search and was suddenly advised to use Google Print to search among books. This was apparently an arbitrary promotion of their new shiny service.
Below are my first impressions and impulsive observations (primarily complaints):
- The top inch of two of each page in each book initially gets displayed as a scan (-)
- The search pages incorporate the option to purchase the book (+)
- Users are encouraged to open an account with Google Print. I am not too fond of this. Registration opens the door to dependencies, much like the signup with Google Sitemaps, which is a pre-requisite to taking advantage of Google Analytics (-)
- The interface is light-weight, clean and navigation is intuitive (+)
All in all, Google Print does not appear as bad as I anticipated. I said a few things against it and a few things in favour. Nonetheless, having so many books scanned and available for viewing per subscription raises a brow or two. It somehow gives Google ownership over the books and will discourage crowds from going to the public libraries. On-line music sales had similar impact on record stores.
