From The New York Times
Google Books: A Complex and Controversial Experiment
By Stephen Heyman
Google won a decisive victory this month when a United States appeals court ruled that its massive project to digitize all the world’s books did not violate authors’ copyrights. The decision ended nearly a decade of challenges that seemed, as recently as September, to place the fate of Google Books in legal limbo. But while litigation is over, the value of the project — to Internet users, academics, and the company itself — remains a matter of debate....
But skeptics say it’s hard to draw conclusions based on Google Books because the company has not shared information about what kinds of texts are in the collection, or how representative they are of culture at large. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has highlighted problems in the way titles are dated and categorized and has called Google Books a “metadata train wreck.”