The Book Stops Here

Daniel H. Pink's "The Book Stops Here" is an article describing how the WIKIPEDIA web site was created. Jimmy Wales created a massive online encyclopedia that is freely available to anyone. The difference between Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias is basically the authors. Wikipedia allows anyone to contribute and make edits to anything that has already been posted. Wales creation has come a long way. In the late 90's, Wikipedia started with 12 articles. Now, the count has leaped to 1.3 million articles.

Although Wikipedia occasionally runs into problems with vandals editing articles with random pictures and information, I don't think it's that big of a deal. When we look at the bigger picture, problems like these are fixed within minutes. The amazing thing about Wikipedia is the people responsible for fixing these vandalized articles. Since contributors become so addicted to Wikipedia, they are more than willing to keep a constant watch for tampered articles.

Personally, I think Wikipedia is a great source that provides general knowledge of any topic, because most of the articles are written with style and language that's easy to understand. Since the articles do not need a formal review process before posting, academics doesn't think information found on Wikipedia is credible. Regardless of what the critics say, I think articles found on Wikipedia are almost as accurate as searching in the encyclopedia. It's always safer to double check the information with another source, but for the most part, I enjoy reading articles that are up to date. Besides, it's not as easy to edit and update a printed encyclopedia. Why would anyone prefer an out-of-date encyclopedia over a never-ending online one?

Throwing Google at the Book

"Throwing Google at the Book" is an article written by Farhad Manjoo describing the legality issues with Google's plan to create a digitalized library. Manjoo lays out two arguments: one that sides with Google, and one that rejects Google's plan.

Reject Google's plan because publishers and copyright owners believe digital copies of books will drastically decrease book sales and increase potential loss for authors. uses the example of napster and how its intention was to preview songs and instead, record sales dropped instead of increasing.

Side with Google thinks that it's a win-win situation for everyone because authors whose books are unknown and not popular will gain recognition when web users search the engine since they never knew it even existed. only showing a couple sentences, not offering to show the whole book or even whole chapters for that matter. if user is interested they still have to go out and buy the book. so everyone wins.