How I might learn to stop worrying and love Google Books

Things that would make me marginally less homicidal (suicidal?) when I'm using Google Books:

1.  Items would have the correct title.  For example, in addition to the Henry Rogers botch pointed out below, we've got early issues of Dance: Screen & Stage (later Dance Magazine) listed as Patrick White's The Living and the Dead.

2.  Snippet view would take you to the text being snipped.  Instead, snippet view often takes you to text in the immediate vicinity of what you're searching for, or on the same page as what you're searching for, or several paragraphs down from what you're searching for...

3.  All items would have complete publication data.  It's not much help if I'm looking at a book with no edition, no publisher, and/or no publication date (or an incorrect publication date).

4.  Magazines and journals would have some (any!) publication data. For example, if I go to an old article from Films in Review, I get a page number without the volume, issue number, or year.  A number of magazines have been entered with only the year of initial publication.  This, when combined with the dreaded snippet view (see above), renders the search function useless: I can't see what I've pulled up (because Google insists on showing me something utterly irrelevant), and I can't ILL the article (because Google provides none of the necessary data).

UPDATE 3/22: Victor Keegan says that "[e]ven while you are reading this, Google and others are scanning libraries of books - including the Bodleian at Oxford - to make tomes that were hitherto hidden available for all to read; in the case of the millions of out-of-copyright and "orphaned" ones, where ownership is unknown, for free."  Am I the only one discovering that many  nineteenth-century texts are almost entirely confined to the aforementioned snippet view? What possible purpose does that serve, especially since the books are all out of copyright?  (I'd love to read Clifford Castle online, as opposed to blowing $145 for a copy on the verge of imminent death, but apparently I can't.  Still, I've been able to download some other rare things.) 

Comments

[Sarah]

The snippet function is useless, particularly when it seems to provide a snippet of a blank page. However, I'm thrilled with Google Books (today at least) because they allowed me to get full access to a book that I would otherwise have had to travel to get to (which isn't feasible with my grad student budget, or working schedule). So it remains partially redeemed in my eyes...for now.

[Bruno Cattivabrutto]

Google Books is actually responsive when you email them with problems such as bad scans, etc.

I wish they would start adding 19th century periodicals--their coverage is extremely spotty. (I think they are just scanning books from the "book" collections of their member libraries, so they only pick up bound issues of magazines that got cataloged, such as early "Quarterly Reviews."

[StyleyGeek]

Ugh. I know.

I have emailed them about some of these issues (especially the journals without publication data) and they ARE responsive. In that they send a response. One that even appears to have been written by a real person.

We just have to keep hoping that one day this will translate into them FIXING the problem.

[Puplet]

I rediscovered Google Books last week. The 19th century full-text library is amazing compared to what it was even six months ago. In one afternoon, I downloaded every single one of the hard-to-find texts I spent *months* tracking down - and far too much money on - for my first book...

Now all I need is a collector to sell my collection to...

[What Now?]

I love or hate Google Books depending on the extent to which they provide the particular text I'm looking for in the moment. I'm fickle that way.

The New Yorker had an article by Jeffrey Toobin on Google Books recently that addressed some of the "snippet" and copyright issues. Very interesting, I thought.