In its frenzy to digitize the holdings of its partner collections, in this case those of the Stanford University Libraries, Google Books has pursued a "good enough" scanning strategy. The books' pages were hurriedly reproduced: No apparent quality control was employed, either during or after scanning. The result is that 29 percent of the pages in Volume 1 and 38 percent of the pages in Volume 2 are either skewed, blurred, swooshed, folded back, misplaced, or just plain missing. A few images even contain the fingers of the human page-turner. (Like a medieval scribe, he left his own pointing hand on the page!) Not bad, one might argue, for no charge and on your desktop. But now I'm dealing with a mutilated edition of a mutilated selection of a mutilated archive of a mutilated history of a mutilated kingdom — hardly the stuff of the positivist, empirical method I was trained in a generation ago.
A random spot-check of other Google-scanned books has yielded some better results, but the general drift is clear: good enough for our mutilated view of the past, rushed through the scanning process so that Google could lay claim to as many artifacts of our cultural past in as short a time and with as small a budget as possible.
But why complain? What's left over is more than enough. Like anyone else, I can now glean dozens of Latin archival documents while in my slippers. Of course, if I wanted reliable texts, I would be at the Columbia, Fordham, or Princeton library, poring through the print volumes, and would make sure I could see the surviving archival remnants. But the point is that Google Books has represented to us that its massive digitization project will offer a valuable, reliable, open-access research tool that would make the digital at least the equivalent and — through its ubiquity and ease — the clear superior of print. It is, after all, the "public good," not the "public good enough," that lies behind all of Google Books' claims for fair-use rights to its digitization schemes.
If Google Books were undertaking this for the few dozen of us knowledgeable and interested in a particular specialized field, why do so at all? Those are not its claims. Its claims are that it is providing the most knowledge for the most good, in the best available form, with the best available means. Thus its right to turn copyright on its head.
But that's just not so.
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