Google Booksearch is becoming one of my go-to scholarly resources. All of the evilness aside, it is extremely useful to be able to look up a chapter or section from a book (even if that book is on the shelf in the other room). Since I manage my reading lists with Amazon, I wanted to make it very easy to look up books in Google Booksearch from Amazon. So I created the following bookmarklet:
When you’re on an Amazon product page, click this bookmarklet and you’ll be taken to the Google Booksearch results for the book. If previewing is allowed for the book, you’ll be able to leaf through it before you purchase/borrow/walk to your shelf. To install the bookmarklet, drag the booksearch lookup link to your bookmarks folder.
Some quick notes on Booksearch:
- Booksearch has changed the way I look at digital books (for the better). I’m a fan of print, and I’ve always had a hard time imagining reading a book on the computer. I still have a hard time with digital long form, but the mistake I made was to think all books were the same. Many books, especially the reference/textbook/manual genre are analogous to large webpages. If you’re searching for a specific bit of information and Google Booksearch can give you the chunk you need, that’s a wondeful case.
- Booksearch has also changed how I look at publishers and libraries. You know how today if you buy an LP, a band will throw a CD in for free? Publishers have to get there, and fast. Libraries need to give me a virtual shelf that houses digital copies of all the books I’ve checked out (and even the ones I’ve returned). We’re simply wasting too much time and money chasing around print resources when a digital resource will do.
- It is unfortunate that Google is the monopoly, but you have to give them credit for taking on a task that would have taken an inter-intitutional consortium eons. Sometimes the market wins. I just wish that the research libraries had thought twice before signing their collections over in perpetuity.
- Finally, I remember a time (not long ago) where music was a scarce resource. To hear a band, you actually had to find a copy of an album or swap a tape. Lots of stuff was like that pre-digital. One of the few places I see that attitude today is around the scholarly book. If there’s a book you need, you’ve got to search it out. If your library doesn’t have it, if ILL is going to take 6 months, if none of your friends are hoarding a copy, you’ve got to plunk down the 50 or 100 or 150 dollars to order the book from somewhere far away. It is totally frustrating, but there’s also a weird sense of pre-digital accomplishment that goes with it – knowing that you posess an actual scarce resource. I know that in a few years my students will just booksearch every version of that book I spent so much time and effort to acquire. I imagine it will feel a little like knowing that there’s a torrent of all the 7″ your favorite band put out, when you worked so hard just to collect a few. Bottom line is we’ll have to get over it, albeit grudgingly.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
