On a typical night near the end of last semester I learned of the greatness that is Google Books. “Google Books?” you ask. “How does putting other people’s writing online count as greatness?” Allow me to explain. On this night, I had an eight-page English paper due the next day. I had already written two or three pages, but the rest of the paper required me to gather actual evidence from the text. In this case, the text was a 1,300-page monstrosity of a novel titled War and Peace. I don’t know what possessed Leo Tolstoy to write such a long book, nor do I understand what possessed my English instructor to make it required reading, but whatever the reason, I was still left with the dubious task of tacking down about 10 very specific passages, totaling maybe eight pages altogether, out of a book so notoriously dense that it is known as the literary equivalent of rocket science (as in, ‘How hard can it be to read? It’s not War and Peace‘). Here’s the kicker: Like most students, I had only read 700-ish pages.
Naturally, I panicked. The paper was due the next day and I needed to find at least four references in all of War and Peace to “the spirit of the army” within the next hour or else I wouldn’t make the deadline. I could try to read the book and hope, but that would be a shot in the dark at best and, more likely, an exercise in futility. There’s always CliffsNotes, but summaries wouldn’t necessarily have the specific words I was looking for. Still, it was the best idea I had, so I Googled “War and Peace” and “CliffsNotes” and searched for a few minutes for “spirit of the army,” finding only one direct reference and two other passing references in the summaries. I knew there was more, so I tried Googling “War and Peace” in hopes of finding another, more specific summary. While searching through my results, I noticed that there was a second category of search results that I could select from called “books.”
My overstressed brain had the thought process of “Yeah, I’m reading a book,” so I clicked the tab, selected the first result and found my salvation: War and Peace in its entirety online. I found the search button, typed in my query and was immediately given nearly 20 different passages in which the words “spirit” and “army” were close together. I was saved.
With my newfound resource and a small bit of ingenuity, I saw the potential for an electronic book with a search function. In the past, college students have wasted untold amounts of time trying to copy quotes into their essays verbatim, but no more. Gone are the worries of misspelling an obscure 20-letter Russian name as transcribing words, sentences and entire paragraphs are now just a copy and paste away. Don’t really want to spend $60 to $70 on English books with poor resale value that you probably won’t even completely read? I don’t blame you, so check online first to see which ones are free. The system isn’t perfect, of course. You have to be particularly careful with translations, as they have a tendency to change from one edition to the next, but in most cases you can get away with it.
Let me put forward another, totally hypothetical situation. Say that you are taking an English class in which there are online quizzes once a week. Let’s also say that one of the books you have to read for this hypothetical class is a hypothetical novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Let’s also say that while you are taking one of these online quizzes, you come across a question you cannot answer. Because you don’t have time to re-read the novel and you don’t know the answer, you figure you are out of options and you’ll just have to guess, but wait – with Google Books, you can look up this hypothetical book, type in a key word from the question and find your answer all in a matter of 30 seconds. Not that I condone this course of action or have ever done it myself, this is purely a thought experiment. I’ll leave morality to you guys.
John Raderman is a sophomore journalism major. He can be reached at raderman@umd.edu.
