Google Books or Great Books?

Jay Mandal

A learned - and long - article about books.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6714491.ece

A gold star if you read the whole article; and a place on Brain of Britain if you know the meaning of all the words.

Stan2

I'd better give this a miss!

Carol

I'll leave it to later then...;)

niddy

think I'll give it a miss too, Stan

Claudia

Oof - well I read the first paragraph and stopped! It should be labled 'how not to write a reader-friendly article'.
p.s. so did you read the whole thing, Jay??

Tessadragon

I totally agree that the electronic word being more accessible to the masses does kill off the aspects that were better controlled on paper, such as spelling. I never thought about the effect of the thesaurus...although it expands a person's display of words, it doesn't demonstrate a depth to learning. I also agree that Google is an uncontrolled explosion of knowledge, difficult to ensure the accuracy of and thus possibly encouraging further errors that people may forever be blind to.
I'm not sure I agree though that google's illumination of texts that would have gone unmissed, is making people step on to seeing the real works on paper. For that to occur, people would have to care about books...and frankly not many do any more. They want the shortcuts, not the scenic route.

Jay Mandal

I got to 'vitiate', thought "This is hard going", looked to see how much more there was - and stopped reading. Maybe I'll go back to it.