From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2015 17:50:56 -0700

This appeared this week on the New Yorker magazine's site:

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books

I'm struck by the gradual shifting of opinion towards the view that
something substantial *should* come out of this enterprise.  List
readers may remember my discovery a couple of years ago that Google
had effectively given up supporting the service when my Google Books
went bad because I dared to use them in Singapore.  Of course, when
they changed the name of the relevant app to "Google Play" it gave a
hint of shifting emphasis.  My own view is that what they really
wanted was the giant corpus of text to process in support of searches
and translation and the like and didn't *much* care about
comprehensiveness, accuracy, or other concerns of interest to scholars
and librarians.  Google folks will read this article and shrug.

Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State