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