Customer Reviews

Fool's Gold: Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library

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Oh, the irony of it all. Mark Y. Herring, the librarian and author of "Fool's Gold: Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library," is at pains to convince us that the Internet has a credibility problem. What Mr Herring is unaware of, apparently, is that he himself has a credibility problem.

Publishing this book the old fashioned way implies that Mr Herring's work was vetted by an editor, if not also a professional fact checker. Perhaps he should have just thrown it up on the Web instead.

On page 46, Mr Herring laments: "Once again, we're victims of our own success, or, as Oscar Wilde once put it, 'nothing exceeds like success.'" Pity you didn't capitalize the "n," but oh well. It's only grammar. Pity you didn't bother with a footnote citing your source. Pity, too, that Oscar Wilde never said those words. What he said was, "Nothing succeeds like excess." But oh well. We know what you meant.

On page 33, you mention: "...[webs]ites like 'Anexoric and Proud' and 'Anexoric Nation'...". Google those terms, Mr Herring. "Did you mean: Anorexic?" Really, any of those pesky little spell checkers would have caught this. But oh well. What's all the fuss?

On page 3: "I worry about what we doing." I worry, too, Mr Herring.

On page 52, we find you talking about: "...patents (which are devilishly difficult to tract anyway)...". To tract? Ah, but we know you meant to say track. Or maybe trace. Whatever.

And what about the page (I can't be bothered, like, (going back to find it (if you know what I mean()) with the orphanage-ful of parentheses. Oh I get it: those were emoticons?

On page 23: "I see these turn of events as so powerful...". This turn of events? These turns of events? You had a 67% chance of getting it right, and you still didn't.

On page 3, you boast: "...after [my] article had been translated into eight different languages that I know about...". HELLO? Hola? Bonjour? Sacre bleu.

On page 54, you lament: "...and will only worsen (ingravesce, as physicians would say)...". Which physicians, exactly, do you mean, Mr Herring? Dead ones? "Ingravesce" does not appear in any dictionary that I know about. (Okay, so maybe I only know about eight of them.)

Again on page 54: "But, what, me worry? as Alfred E. Newman made famous." Mr Herring, any 13-year-old knows: Alfred spells his name "Neuman". But no matter. It's okay to be wrong as long as you can be righteous at the same time.

And isn't it a shame that neither you nor your ersatz editor has grokked the difference between "which" and "that". Page 53: "For example, the vendor which supplies access to the online catalog where I work, Innovative Interfaces, is considered by many in our profession to be the Cadillac, the Rolls-Royce, of automated systems." So you got a job with Innovative Interfaces? As what: their hood ornament?

And here's the real clincher. Page vi (Acknowledgments): "The Quellenforschuung for this book, the source-hunting, could not have been more ably done." Google it, dude. "Did you mean: Quellenforschung?"

Incroyable!

And on page 55: "Sadly, the American Library Association (along with the usual suspects like the ACLU and First Amendment absolutists) have gone to great lengths...". Sadly, Mr Herring, the ALA HAS gone to great lengths to secure your book's right to reside, along with all the others written under the protection of the First Amendment, in any public library in America--despite its sloppy grammar, poor punctuation, inaccurate quotations, pretentious word choice, and, in sum, utter lack of credibility or scholarly value.

But oh well.

This book is hilarious, although not for the reasons the author intends. Other reviewers have commented on Herring's laughable attempts to show his erudition by sending the reader to the

dictionary to look up words like cacoethes and gallimaufry.

The most revealing aspect of the book is the amount of ink devoted to sex on the web. Herring treats the subject with a Puritan's prudishness but a connoisseur's familiarity with the details of Internet pornography. Speaking of cacoethes...

Of course, I refuse to buy ebooks that cost more than $12. But if I really, really, really wanted to pan this gold, ie. read this book, that would be so much more affordable than the print version, priced at a rather inflated $46.

I teach at a community college. Our online resources dwarf what is available in the stacks. Not only more e-books but the net provides access to materials no traditional library could hope to match. For example, Purple math, the Virtual Math Lab and Khan academy for math. Biology I & II (lonestar.edu) for chemistry, biology and anatomy. OWL at Purdue for writing. Free online courses available from Harvard. The internet has replaced textbooks for several of my classes. The information available online is not only more varied and up to date (text book may be five years or more behind the latest research) it is immeasurably cheaper. Biology students can get used texts from Amazon at a fraction of the cost of a new book as well as up to date text and multimedia for free from leading universities.

Even as I write this libraries around the country are getting the axe due to budget shortfalls. Google will digitize the worlds books because it's cheaper and easier to deliver content that way. Small libraries will vanish, larger ones will adapt or die. I love books, but the author of this book is not simply wrong but laughably, pitifully wrong on all counts. The only use for this book is as an exhibit at his next tenure review.

Herring, Marl. Fool's Gold: Why the Internet is no substitute for a library. McFarland & Company, Inc.: Jefferson, North Carolina, 2007.

As a person who feels it's the quality of knowledge and the ability of the people that manage that information that count, this book gets a big thumbs up. Fool's Gold is actually an amplification Dr. Herring's 10 talking points on why the internet is no substitute for a library that became an article, and a poster. This is both the good and the bad news about the work. It is a long read and tends to be repetitive. Any book with a 23 page introduction has an author with a real passion for his subject and doesn't want you to miss it. If you are doing research and looking for an authoritative and comprehensive look at what the "The tower of Google" could do to our society, Fool's Gold is your source. The indexing and source notes are an interesting read in and of themselves. Many times I found my self muttering "yea, that's right!" You tell them!" However, if you want a more compact version look for his article and if "u r lukng 4 th 411" in a compact version, buy the poster and be sure to hang it where your students can read it. Better yet have them read from the original. It doesn't matter if your library gives it to them in print or e-formation dujour; the librarian will know which one will work best.