Google Book Search

One of my main wishes, is for there to be one set of rules for the world - the current copyright, region encoding, etc. makes it more difficult than it needs to be. This was evident when using Google Book Search. Some of the books I found were frustratingly not available outside the US. Google really needs to focus on becoming less USA-centric, especially if it wants to succeed in the Asian market).

I do love that they have started archiving magazines online, and found a few useful articles in the Organic Gardening magazine. However, most of my searching found nothing, indicating that the online archive is woefully small. With more libraries joining the effort to digitise their collections, this problem will be resolved sometime, probably in the far future. Unfortunately, some libraries are very protective of their digital collections, and may not share these with Google.

Google Books complements Google Scholar, which is an online repository for research journal articles. Again, the archive is small, and many other research catalogs, have more complete collections, usually available for a fee, and typically tightly focused on one area of research. I was really pleased when I found that one of my research papers had been referenced, but not so happy when I found I had to pay for the article. I did anyway, because it was the first to reference something written by me! I would love for journals and conferences to make their articles available for free, there is not enough funding for education and research throughout the world, and I am sure this would greatly help spur creative research and reduce the reliance on funding.

Google Books on Wikipedia