Google Books' Biggest Screw-Up Danger??

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:54 PM -0400 9/24/07, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 9/8/07, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>  To my dismay I have discovered yet another pitfall in Google Books.
>>
>>    After the maddeningly familiar gap created by pages "not part of
>>this book preview,"
>>  a book by Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister A. Y. Vyshinsky entitled
>>_The USSR and
>>  World Peace_ (N.Y.: Ayer, 1949), suddenly becomes at p. 143,
>>without even the warning
>>  of a new albeit hidden title page, a rather different book, _The
>>Mind on the Wing_, by
>>  Herbert F. West, a collection of essays on books and book collecting.
>
>Here's another good one...
>
>http://books.google.com/books?id=ExWtQuGacMYC
>
>This one displays metadata for  _The Common Sense of Political
>Economy_ by Philip Henry Wicksteed, but actually contains the text of
>two entirely different books: _J R McCulloch: A Study in Classical
>Economics_ by D P O'Brien, followed, naturally enough, by _Focus
>Structure in Generative Grammar_ by Carsten Breul! (I was looking for
>the Breul and found myself in econo-land.)
>
It's probably my fault.  I've just been reading a bunch of papers on
political economy for the social sciences appointments committee I'm
sitting on, and I have the Yale library copy of that Carsten Breul
book on my office shelf.  Mea culpa.

LH

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