This is not a blog entry by an author who thinks that Google Books is evil because it promotes the idea of free books. This is a blog entry by an author who sees Google Books as an invaluable research tool but who gets frustrated and enraged every time he tries to use it. I know there's a Feedback page on Google Books where problems can be reported. But the problems I experience are so fundamental that the Feedback page seems grossly adequate. In short, Google Books seems to have been put together with a deficient sense of bibliographic integrity, which is a real problem if you're trying to assemble an online library. Here's today's real-life example: I wanted to get a sense of the historic occurrence of the phrase "Turing Machine" in books and periodicals published since the phrase was first coined by Alonzo Church in the March 1937 issue of The Journal of Symbolic Logic in a review of Alan Turing's 1936 paper that introduced the concept. I was most interested in the earliest references Read More...