I was checking out Google's updated mobile site on my iPod Touch and noticed that it includes Google Books. The interface is actually not bad, but the OCR could use some work. Below is Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, looking a little like a ransom note or Riddley Walker. To be fair, the regular text is not as messed up as the TOC and list of "illustbations". I fear for a future, though, when all we might have left is crappy OCR'ed e-books of classics. Arga warga.
(Yeah, I know they save the full scans too and you can view the books as images in the non-mobile version.)
As to the future, don't forget it will still have the actual books, hopefully restored to the library whence Google took them. As a technologist married to a historian, I see both sides of the paper/silicon gap... and I was always impressed by how the 15th century volumes we peruse in old archives have weathered time so much better than my 5-1/4" floppies that I no longer have the drive to read (and that probably would be full of checksum errors if I did).
The Internet did wonders for short-term accessibility, but long-term survival may still depend on wood pulp.
Posted by: Nathan Zeldes | Saturday, April 11, 2009 at 01:16 AM