Ben Vershbow of If:book has taken a look at Google Print and doesn’t like what he sees:

This is not an online library, it’s a marketing program. Google Print will undeniably have its uses, but we shouldn’t confuse it with a library.

Well, yes. We knew Google wanted to make money off this enterprise, and it is frustrating that it’s difficult to read Google’s scans online. But did Google ever promise us a library? I thought the point was to index these works, not to loan them out like a library.

More frustrating to me is the workings of Google’s more blatantly commercial Google Print Publisher. Here, the marketing aspect comes out much more clearly. Take a look at this screenshot from a search of Martin Ewans’ Afghanistan:

Entire pages have been omitted from the search. How does this function like an index? If I wanted to know something more specific than whether Ewans covered the Taliban in his history of Afghanistan, I may not find what I’m looking for. Google’s explanation of all this?

I’m already logged in. Why are you telling me the page is unavailable?
As part of our efforts to protect a book’s copyright, a set of pages in every in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.

I really need to see more of this book. What can I do?
Google Print helps you discover books, not read them online. To read the whole book, we encourage you to use the “Buy this book” link to purchase it online or the “Find this in a library” link to look for a local library that has it.

Well, we knew the idea of Google Print was for Google to make money by marketing the books. But how am I to know if I “really need to see more” if the entire book isn’t indexed? Google’s excuse is that they need to “protect a book’s copyright” — now they’re not seeming like quite the copyright vanguards they once did, are they?

Of course, in public-domain books, the entire text will be available. But it sounds like for out-of-print books still in copyright, arguably the most valuable resource of Google Print, we’re still not going to have a true index of all the pages. That’s a frustrating limitation. On the other hand, Google Print is a free resource that we didn’t have access to before. Can that be such a terrible thing?