The Way We GoogleBooks Now

Timothy Burke bemusedly observes that "of the texts I’ve looked at recently in Google Books, quite a few of them seem sloppy: lines at the bottom of the page distorted or unreadable, half-pages missing, weird noise or distortion."  I've been griping about this off and on for some time now, but the subject merits a return visit. 

As conceived, GoogleBooks is an obvious boon to readers, including impoverished graduate students and contingent faculty, moderately-less impoverished full-time faculty, and independent scholars (the latter of whom can face real obstacles in gaining access to university libraries, let alone research funding).  Those of us who cannot afford to jump on a plane to read the only-extant copy of a novel held at the Bodleian now have the opportunity to read it in the (relative) comfort of our homes and offices.  Moreover, the search function means that it is now possible to identify relevant materials--articles in Victorian Christian periodicals, for example--in texts that are scattered across multiple repositories in both Europe and the United States.  I don't think anyone would deny that these are positive results.

However:

1.  As any bibliographer can tell you, a digital copy of a text cannot replace the original.   Specialists in the history of the book lose relevant information (about specific print techniques, ink, paper composition, bookbindings, watermarks, etc.) when faced with digitized texts.  Moreover,  non-bibliographers discover that digitization sometimes worsens flaws in the paper original; for example, scanning a book printed on especially cheap paper sometimes results in excessive "bleed-through" from the verso.  Similarly, faded inks and stereotypes at the end of their lifespan reproduce badly under current conditions, as do some smaller fonts.   Frontispiece engravings may or may not scan properly.  Etcetera. 

2.  A badly-reproduced book is an only partially useful book.  Or a completely useless book, depending on how badly it was copied.  And it can be more difficult than you think to obtain photocopies of poorly-scanned or missing pages, depending on the source library; some libraries, for example, require substantial minimum charges for photocopies that need to be sent via post.  (Someone in the USA who wants a single page from a book held by Cambridge, for example, quickly discovers that the minimum charge is ten pounds, before all of the other fees; right now, that's over $20 USD.)

Incidentally, switching from page view to plain text HTML frequently produces very scary results--and I'm not just talking about the lost paragraphing.   Punctuation disappears (including quotation marks), words partially vanish or are misspelled, etc.

3.  A poorly-digitized text + de-accessioning = headaches.   Libraries will absolutely deaccession print materials if a digital version appears, even though the digital version may be inferior or offer less ease of use.  This can be a real problem with reference materials (years ago, I discovered one library that decided to chuck the entire Union Catalog...)   and bound periodicals.  But older texts of all sorts suffer similar fates.

4.  Complementary search techniques.  Online searching works very well with definite targets; it doesn't work very well if a book is missing some obvious keyword (or suffers from typos).  A search for "Popery" won't necessarily net me anything that references the "Church of Rome."    In addition, searching the old-fashioned way--by shelfwalking, sitting down with a stack of periodicals, or working through a library's rare books collection--often yields essential data and/or connections that won't necessarily appear in an online search.  (To finish one of the articles I'm currently planning, for example, I'm still going to have to finance a trip to England, even though I can do a lot of preliminary work on GoogleBooks.)    

5.  Editions, editions...  It goes without saying that up-to-date, copyrighted scholarly editions are largely inaccessible on GoogleBooks, given the restrictions.  It does not therefore follow that the editions available on GoogleBooks are necessarily editions anyone should cite.  Thus, someone in search of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments will only find nineteenth-century editions, despite Thomas S. Freeman's stern warnings about just how appallingly bad they are [1].  Similarly, nineteenth-century translations from Greek and Latin do not always travel well, shall we say (as A. E. Housman so spectacularly pointed out).  Nineteenth-century (and earlier) editors have been known to bowdlerize, silently abridge, or just as silently update older texts, all of which can have dangerous results for the more modern academic.   

[1] E.g., Thomas Freeman, "Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,'" Sixteenth Century Journal 30.1 (1999): 23-46.  JSTOR.  This article focuses on the first and most popular of the four complete Victorian editions, edited by Stephen Cattley and George Townsend.

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

One thing I've noticed is that some of the badly scanned texts also don't search well within the text, actually--I was checking last night and I found that anything on the bottom of a page with distortion didn't appear in a search for those phrases.

[Amateur Reader]

I've been looking at a Google Books scan of a translation of Heinrich Heine's "Atta Troll" that has the scanner's thumb on a number of pages.

[skg046]

Lisa Spiro has posted recently on a related topic. (I enjoyed your post well enough to keep it "pinned" in Bloglines, so that I could find it again later....)