Reading in Cyberspace?!

Google Book Search allows the user to read the book without even holding it in his/her own hands. It provides a great convenience for those who don't wish to purchase or to borrow the book. It allows the person using the program to be able to read up the books in the convenience of their own house.

The bad side about this program is that the authors are losing money by doing it this way. It prevents people from actually buying the book from the stores, therefore preventing the authors to gain any money. It makes the copies, that the publisher originally published, useless. The publishers could make a limited amount of copies then have people upload it on the computer. In the end, the authors are losing out on money and losing out on sales because people can anonymously read it on the internet.

Google's competitors will not take this sitting down. Surely Yahoo! and Microsoft will answer this by creating their own version of Book Search. Eventually, these competitors will upload every book out there in the world. If every book can be easily searched at Book Searches then that would make publishing books worthless. Even though it is at the author's and publisher's content, it would affect the world in a very big way. If Yahoo! and Microsoft competes with this, then eventually there'll be times where you search for a book and the information given back to you is irrelevant, just like how one half of the searches that pop up in Google and Yahoo! is irrelevant.

This project will have an immense affect on accessing information. People can easily search for books that may not be in your local library. This way, you don't even need to borrow the book. But it'll also create the temptation of copying the whole content without rewording it. In other words, it's plagiarism.

Also, with this new project coming into the light, I believe that the jobs of librarian might be threatened. Librarians help finding books in the library and if this project comes into perfection, then people won't have to go to the library to look for research books and so forth.

Google Book Search is a great way to search for and find books and at the same time read it. There are a lot of pros and cons that comes with this program and it all ends up on what you use it for.