I like to think of myself as an information specialist, savvy at finding what I need to know. I work in the academic world partly within a university publisher and partly within a university library; I should know something about information searching and accessibility. Yet I notice that finding information in books is tough. If I use my free-time interest, woodworking, as a concrete example, I am often interested in finding descriptions of furniture collections in historical houses, to use as inspiration. The typical scenario is that I figure there should be any number of books written about the history of European manor houses, which tangentially will include photos and descriptions of their contents, but I do not know in advance which books these are.
In the old days, one went to a library and using the cataloguing system tried to find sections with relevant material, but since I was usually looking for content which was not the main purpose of a book, this often did not work particularly well. In the digital age, one would suspect that this should have changed. Books all begin life in an electronic format, from which a printed edition is created and hence it is logical to expect days their content is searchable. However, visit virtually any library and one finds that the systems for looking for books have not changed much. Catalogs are now computer-based, but their content is not so different from the old card-based systems. In effect all you can search for are title, selected keywords (few) and authors' names.
So what does one do? The Google Books initiative has been controversial, but from the perspective of an information searcher, it is a godsend; finally it is possible to search in the full-text of a large number of books and while it may not be possible to read an entire book, it is usually possible to read a page or so around the content of interest. If nothing else, it allows one to know what books to look for in a subsequent visit to the library, or it allows one to make a more informed judgment about whether the book is of interest to purchase. The adversity to Google Books has come from some publishers and authors. I definitely believe that those that produce books should be paid, but there are many of us consumers that are far more likely to buy a book if we have some idea of its content (beyond a three-line summary). Certainly my book purchases have increased since Google Books came along. I find it very well worth the effort of building up a collection of books (and these days I have hundreds of books in mine) that cover topics of interest to me in my Google Books account and then the next time I am researching one of my woodworking projects finding some background or inspiration is relatively easy.
