User:Uncle G/On common Google Books mistakes

Google Books is one of many search engines that one can use to find sources, but it's frequently mis-used. There are erroneous assumptions that people make about how it works, and common mistakes that are made.

Maxims to bear in mind[edit]

Here are several maxims to bear in mind in order to avoid the common mistakes in using Google Books. Note that some of these are not specific to its use for Wikipedia purposes, but are in fact mistakes than can be made in general use of Google Books.

Don't ever just point to a Google Books search.: What you see will not be what other people see. They won't necessarily see the results in the same order as you. They won't even necessarily see all of the same books as you.
A search URL is not a list of results.: A URL for a search page (re-)runs that search for the person following the hyperlink, and presents whatever one of Google's query servers finds at the time. If you want to give a list of results, actually give a list of results. Give them as proper citations, too. Don't scrape the Google Books results page that you see.
Don't use bare Google Books external hyperlinks as citations.: Give a proper citation, with the title, author, publisher, year of publication, and page number. Supply the ISBN, where available, so that people can follow the Special:Booksources hyperlink to a book source of their choice.^[1] (For discussion pages, I personally use a brief ISBN+page number format. But for articles, always a full citation and never a Google Books hyperlink.) Bare URLs are subject to linkrot, remember, and this is as true of Google Books as anywhere else.
Don't rely upon what Google Books lists as publication dates.: Some books listed by Google Books with modern publication dates are 20th and 21st century reprints of old books that are now in the public domain. Always check the actual publication date of the book.
Remember to ignore the Wikipedia mirrors.: The time has long since passed that Google Books could be relied upon to be free of circularly sourced content that came from some original research that someone wrote on Wikipedia in the first place. There's a good reason that {{find sources}} excludes several things from its searches. See User:Fences and windows/Unreliable sources#Wikipedia mirrors for just some of the several series of books that are mirrors of Wikipedia in print form.
Remember that there are other book sources.: Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com are some of the many book sources that people can use if you supply a proper citation. Also bear in mind that what one sees at Google Books is subject to the readability and other problems touched upon in Duguid 2007. So instead of giving Google Books page number URLs¹, use something like these, which provide the information for a reader, or other editor, to locate a book using whatever book source xe finds best:

(for discussion page use) ISBN 9780674000780 pp. 200 and ISBN 9780674000780 pp. vii (for article use) Rawls 1999, pp. 200 and Rawls 1999, pp. vi Rawls, John (1999). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674000780.	`(for discussion page use) {{ISBN\|9780674000780}} pp. 200 and {{ISBN\|9780674000780}} pp. vii` `(for article use) {{harvnb\|Rawls\|1999\|pp=200}} and {{harvnb\|Rawls\|1999\|pp=vi}}` `**{{cite book\|title=A theory of justice\|first=John\|last=Rawls\|publisher=Harvard University Press\|year=1999\|isbn=9780674000780}}`

How Google Books actually works as opposed to misconceptions[edit]

Several of these maxims have their roots in erroneous assumptions that people make about how Google Books works. How it actually works is somewhat different to what people generalize from their personal experience.

Google Books presents things differently to different people in different parts of the world. There are many reasons behind this. Officially, Google Books tries to respect different countries' copyright requirements.^[2] But there are almost certainly other factors at work, including things like incomplete database replication. What you see as a full preview, someone in another part of the world may see as no preview at all, and vice versa. What you see in results listings may not be what is seen by other people whose searches happen to be run on another of Google's query servers.

Google Books restricts how much you can read. If you look at the "Web History" list for your Google account, you'll see that Google Books records and remembers what books you've read, and which individual pages you've read of them. (People without Google accounts are yet further restricted in their reading.^[3]) If you've read over your reading limit, you may not be able to read pages that other people can read. And, conversely, if you hyperlink to a preview of a book page on Google, other people over their own reading limits may not be able to read that page even though you can.

Google Books isn't static over time. What may have been a full view book years ago may only be a snippet view, or even no preview, book now, and vice versa.

Footnotes[edit]

^1 Hyperlinks to individual book pages on Google are not officially documented by Google, which only documents (Google & 3) how to link to whole books. However, and remembering that they won't work for everyone, hyperlinks to individual pages can be constructed like this:
- http://books.google.com/books?id=kvpby7HtAe0C&pg=PA200 — for page 200 of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971).
- http://books.google.com/books?id=kvpby7HtAe0C&pg=PR7 — for page vii of the same book.

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

"How do you determine if a book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright?". Using Google Books.
"Why do I have to log in to see certain pages?". Using Google Books.
"ISBN". MediaWiki technical manual.