An interesting piece from the latest Library Journal.
“The idea behind our study [at University at Buffalo] was quite simple, although the execution required some tools and lots of heavy lifting. We examined one typical day of searching from the logs of BISON and got every search and the count of results. Then we ran this same set of searches against Google Books and compared them.”
Interesting article. Booksearch is rapidly becoming a useful tool but not a replacement (yet) for books. If you are looking for a print copy of a particular book you still need the local catalogue. Worldcat is looking like an interesting compromise at the moment as are the catalogues that have obvious links from the item record to booksearch