google’s library book search is not doing great (right now)

2024-09-27 18:55

a quick one to start off the weekend: google’s library book search feature only seems to want to give you e-books.

i’m a big fan of the woks of life, a chinese cooking website that has written a lot of great, well-presented chinese cooking recipes. as it turns out they have a cookbook¹. i’m a big fan of physical cookbooks and was wonderin if the library had a bunch in stock, so i googled it. here’s what i saw:

hmm, e-books only? aw dang. oh well!

at least, that’s what i thought a day ago, until today i realized that hey, google’s not in a great place right now. so i decided to check the library’s actual search engines, like i used to have to many decades ago. here it is at the new york public library:

incredible! i’m placing a hold.

but… why is google like this?

it’s easy to decry this as another example of “enshittification”, but let’s dig a bit deeper first.

this integration is a relatively new feature, as of 2022, and this integration merely mirrors WorldCat, run by an organization called OCLC and which has existed in some form since 1971.

now if i type in “woks of life” into WorldCat i get the physical book as the second result, which then returns to me physical books in local public libraries. but it sure seems to want to give me the e-book first.

maybe that’s because libary e-books are big business: OverDrive, the most popular e-book licenser, is making hand-over-fist over contracts that libraries are struggling to afford. there have been attempts at legislation but they have been vetoed thanks to ongoing lawsuits and lobbying efforts by the publishing industry.

even so, the fault here seems to be a rather shoddy integration between google and worldcat. i have no idea when this will be fixed. until then, i’m using worldcat directly to search my libraries and maybe considering the ongoing ramifications of trying to obtain all my knowledge from a single point of failure…