the end of thumbing through books?

It could, quite possibly, be a terrible admission on my part, but yesterday I used Google Books to find two quotes in books that were sitting right next to me. Need to find what Richard Florida has to say about careers for that chapter on ‘cultural workers?’ No problem. Lecturing on Veblen and you aren’t quite sure where that line is about how women are the ‘chief ornament’ of the pecuniary class? You’ve got it. Even when the pages aren’t included in the limited preview, it seems that the search allows you to see the page if you request something specifically.  (And yes, Google Scholar includes Google Books in its searches.) It’s enough for me to have one of those dark moments wherein I realize that I could never be an academic if not for technologies like word processing (I keep an Underwood in my house to remind me of it), and mull further thoughts about how Google is secretly destroying all the information that it cannot index.