Google Books is how I search for new academic texts and titles. While there are more targeted, specialized knowledge repositories for academic audiences like JSTOR and ProQuest, for me Google Books’ advantage lies in the fact that it holds approximately 40 million titles in more than 500 hundred languages made up of both fictional and academic texts. It is an ambitious project by the Google team, albeit at times steeped in legal controversies and copyright issues.
Finding texts on Google Books is easy. The “Any document” and “Any time” features let users select what kind of text they are looking for—“Books, Magazines, Newspapers”—and the time frame that text would have been published in. For older users who at times are resistant to change, Google Books allows the option of using their old web interface instead of the newer, updated version. Moreover, as an aid to academics, this service enables citations to be exported.
The true promise of this platform is that anyone, almost anywhere can access this huge library of texts (with the acknowledgement of course that full access to all these texts is not possible). The implicit understanding is that Google is preserving these texts, is reducing the physical space bound books take by storing them in the ether, up in the cloud, or wherever one imagines the internet to exist. This belief, however, is unaware of data centers and the physical space they occupy so that we may free up more space in libraries or our bookshelves at home as we make use of platforms like Google Books. It is ignorant of the maintenance costs of running these data centers and the invisible infrastructure that supports knowledge queries of the digital age.
Google Books’ potential to democratize knowledge is real; the access this service provides is unprecedented. What is also real though is how easily this access can be disrupted through both physical and political means. Internet connectivity issues recently occurred when sharks damaged underwater optic fiber cables. Political changes in the global landscape took place like Russia’s increased internet censorship during the war on Ukraine. What these examples highlight is that internet access—and by default access to knowledge repositories like Google Books—is tenuous. Access can be revoked at any time, outside of a user’s control. Thus, while knowledge is arguably within easier reach of most people their ownership over it has diminished. We can search up titles on Google Books and read texts, but we cannot always be sure that access will not be revoked because of physical or political issues. None of this, however, is meant to be a condemnation of the digital age or the tools that exist because of it. I only wish to check our expectations and interrogate the promise of online platforms like Google Books. The systems in place needed to operate these platforms are vast and it is time that we as users were more aware of what we take part in using these online knowledge repositories.
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