Reading in Cyberspace

Google Book Search is a new tool to make it easier for people who want to either buy or borrow books. It gets these books from libraries and publishers. There are little pieces of information for people with a full view, limited preview, a snippet view, or bibliographic information for books without a preview.

The use of Google Book Search would result in a decent relationship with publishers. It would help promote their books. Google would publish a 'full-view' (reading the whole book) if it is deemed out of copyright, or given permission to be released as a whole to Google Book Search. Google Book Search has links to the publisher to directly buy their book, and to libraries for people to borrow the book. This is a new and effective to promote books.

This tactic might not go unnoticed by others if this is successful. Other companies like Yahoo! and Microsoft will introduce similar programs to compete with Google.

This project would have a major impact on the access to information. Society is becoming more technological based, and we have new ways to get this information more quickly than before. We now have the Internet to make our lives in searching for material a lot easier. There are bookstores and libraries that allow us to get the book we want, but Google Book Search would find all of books that have the title you have typed in expanding your results. This is a unique way of searching for books through a known search engine.

There would not be an effect towards job positions in libraries, and book stores. There would always be people going to a library or bookstore to get books. Also, libraries, and book stores already use the Internet to allow people to hold books and to purchase them, so their jobs are safe.

I think that Google Book Search is a "fair use". The jobs of librarians are not being jeopardized as it is like a book search engine in the library today. Despite some publishers may think this is 'free advertising', the same can be said with all websites. Therefore, there would be no search engines. Google is a trusted company and this would only benefit everyone.