Three cheers for Steven M. Cohen

If you don’t get American Libraries direct, then you may have missed this article by Steven M. Cohen, about how Google marketed their way into the library world, then promptly left us in the cold when they got what they wanted from us. Nice.

I will be the first to tell you that I like a lot of Google’s tools. I make good use of them and I tell others. But Google Books is an utter shame and no I’m not going to provide a link to it. The books that Google scans can only be found via the Google or the Google Books search page. That is called limiting access, folks, and it more than whispers the beginnings of turning everything scanned into proprietary information in some way.

Just go to OCA, please, where the Open Library is more in line with our profession.