As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

No way!

I wonder if there is a way an independent human-researched database with accurate metadata for all the books (the article's main issue with Google) can be economically feasible (or even profitable) for somebody to build... This sounds like the kind of damage the Internet SHOULD be able to work around...

This just in: imperfect database is imperfect.

Any scholar looking for broad swaths of data will need to use multiple sources. But how this is a "disaster" for scholars is beyond me. I mean, the techniques we used to get information before Google are presumably still available to us...

Yeah I thought this was going to be some sort of copyright or information policy rant but since they're mostly criticizing the way books are cataloged and metadata is extracted from them it seems like there's nothing here for google or GBS advocates to really take exception to. It's hard to argue that google doesn't care about serving the needs of information seekers so it's like they care about the same thing you care about. Let's work on it.