Reading in Cyberspace

For me, going to the library can be such a hassle especially if your a Mary Ward student, but now that I have been introduced to the Google Book Search, I don't even have to leave my house. Google Book Search is a program which you can access the full text for certain books. This service is library-based. Having this program on Google will indeed affect publishers negatively because Google is making a profit for the publishers work and publishers feel they aren't being taken into consideration. How could publishers not support this program? First of all, Google didn't ask publishers for permission to do this, and second of all, they aren't receiving any profits. It's only normal for publishers to be against this whole thing. Google's competitors such as Yahoo and Microsoft are also against Google's Book Search, but the only reason why they're against this is because Google is way ahead of them and all they can do is try to keep up. Since Google Book Search was created it has given people the advantage to access most books, both new and old. That makes it so much easier to locate information from and for books. Even though, this is a library based digitization, librarians should still be threatened because some books cannot be fully previewed, so if the book you need has only a little bit of information available on the computer, then no matter what, you'll still have to go to the library sooner or later. In my personal opinion, I feel this new library based digitization is a big advantage for me, it gives me much more time on other things, and when I need information right away, I don't even need to search or reserve books. I feel sooner or later publishers will have an agreement with Google and could possibly improve the Google Book Search.