Historian takes aim at Google Books

On the American Historical Association's blog, there was an interesting post a few days ago by historian Robert Townsend about the problems he found in using Google Books on a regular basis for three months:

my experience suggests the project is falling far short of its central promise of exposing the literature of the world, and is instead piling mistake upon mistake with little evidence of basic quality control. The problems I encountered fit into three broad categories—the quality of the scans is decidedly mixed, the information about the books (the “metadata” in info-speak) is often erroneous, and the public domain is curiously restricted.

Read the full post by Townsend here.