Google Books is a miserable failure

 Have you noticed how, despite all the boasts about number of books scanned by the "Google Books" project, they don't seem to end up featuring in your reading life?


It's fair to assume someone searching for "The Histories" wants an English translation of Herodotus's 5th Century BC work.  The liberty to distribute the text  thus depends on the vintage of the particular translation, not of the original work in Greek.  

In the case of this classic, there are English translations in the public domain, and English translations still under copyright (variously by jurisdiction).

What to make, then, of a service claiming to offer "books", where the versions referenced in search results have promised text availability "Limited preview", "Limited preview", "No preview", "No preview", and "No preview".

Google Books is what you get when a tacky band of uncultured geeks, mostly describing themselves as "smart", take their bludgeons to big piles of books: no actual readable digital texts.

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