[WikiEN-l] Google Books class action lawsuit

[Charles Matthews]

Carcharoth wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8237271.stm
>
> Interesting story there. Hadn't realised there was even a lawsuit in progress.
>   
"With Google books, any student anywhere in the US will have the books 
in the greatest libraries of the world at their fingertips." Which is 
terrific, if you happen to be in the USA.

I have a few questions about Google Books, which in general as a service 
makes it much easier for me to find references.

1. Do we have an approved and sensible citation style for GB?

The point is that some people simply paste in the very long GB URL for a 
page. I tend to do the other thing, which is to treat it no differently 
from a book I have open in front of me.

2. How much do we know about visibility of GB pages in various countries 
round the world?

This obviously affects what to do about 1. (There is a clear 
contradiction to our mission if the given reference as URL appears 
broken in various parts of the world.)

3. The GB interface is in beta, I think, and the recent upgrade appeared 
to be largely cosmetic (and unhelpful to people like me who would like 
to copy-and-paste citation details, since the year of publication was 
moved). Can we influence their designers?

There is the issue: could there be a button so that a full citation (GB 
URL _plus_ traditional page reference) was made available? Since the 
metadata is (sadly) often substandard, could there be a routine way of 
reporting this to Google as feedback? In general, could the WMF get its 
act together as a potential large-scale "customer" likely to link to 
many relatively obscure scholarly texts on GB, and explain our 
requirements to make good linking as easy as possible?

Charles