Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country
That's not true at all. An astonishing number of out-of-print books are available used through Abebooks and Amazon. This "unicorn" canard is an intelligence-insulting flaw in what is otherwise a pretty good piece. He repeats it in another place too:
[Out-of-print books] are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores.
It's ironic, or rather disingenuous, that Brin would make this argument as if the internet didn't exist. The situation he describes is the one that book-hunters had to deal with pre-web.
Nevertheless, I think Google Books is, without any exaggeration, a great contribution to civilization. I was at Stanford when they first started advocating the project. It was widely regarded as a vain extravagance and/or futuristic pipe-dream. That they went ahead and got it done anyway is one of the things I most respect about Google, or more precisely Brin and Page, because as far as I can tell this was all them. It is an outstanding example of what visionary founders can do.
Lots and lots of books are available used, but the ones at the end of the "long tail" aren't and probably never will be, and that's the most exciting thing about this for me. I have actually done as he described and traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Washington DC just to visit libraries that had books that didn't exist anywhere else, and would have been grateful to be able to pay for scans instead of making the trip.
That's not true at all. An astonishing number of out-of-print books are available used through Abebooks and Amazon. This "unicorn" canard is an intelligence-insulting flaw in what is otherwise a pretty good piece. He repeats it in another place too:
[Out-of-print books] are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores.
It's ironic, or rather disingenuous, that Brin would make this argument as if the internet didn't exist. The situation he describes is the one that book-hunters had to deal with pre-web.
Nevertheless, I think Google Books is, without any exaggeration, a great contribution to civilization. I was at Stanford when they first started advocating the project. It was widely regarded as a vain extravagance and/or futuristic pipe-dream. That they went ahead and got it done anyway is one of the things I most respect about Google, or more precisely Brin and Page, because as far as I can tell this was all them. It is an outstanding example of what visionary founders can do.