Open Book Alliance

I’ve recently signed up to receive updates from the Open Book Alliance, which is basically a consortium of libraries, companies and authors’ organizations opposed to Google’s possible dominance of book digitization. On their site they had a pdf of a presentation given that illustrates some of the more glaring scanning and metadata errors that have appeared so far in Google’s massive scanning project. Some of them are absolutely incredible, and in my opinion strong evidence of why we can’t rely on a private company and unskilled scanners – instead of librarians – to digitize and classify millions of books. And while I am a fan of the many of the products Google produces or has bought, and the convient integration of multiple platforms, I'm starting to become wary of doing so, especially as my information sharing is increasingly being stored on and filtered through Google servers.

Anyway, here's the presentation. It's worth checking out:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/GBook/GoogBookMetadataSh.pdf