GBS: A Little Brin-Snark


There’s a letter today in the New York Times, responding to Sergey Brin’s op-ed from last week:

To the Editor:

Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009

The writer is a novelist.

I wrote in, too, but they picked the right letter.

Hat tip: Michael Froomkin


From Sergey Brin’s Op-Ed: “This quotation would hardly surprise anyone who follows electric vehicles.” I would be more surprised if I was inside the vehicle. Douglas The University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me


More on the Brin-Page-Schmidt-Troika,s arrogance is reported in Ken Auletta’s piece in the current New Yorker Magazine.


Some Brin snark from C. E. Petit this evening, with interesting insights into the Library of Alexandria.