14 DAY TRIAL // Image search has been with us since the early days of the internet. But, while regular search has evolved and results in the first page, even for obscure searches, are relatively clean and safe, image search still hints at the early, wild days of the internet, especially as you start scrolling down.
Still, a search is a search and you'd expect at least the first result to be fairly representative. That's probably not the premise of the Google book, an illustrated dictionary with a twist.
The creators ran image searches for 21,000 dictionary words and added the first image result to the book. The 1,240-page dictionary is certainly interesting, though it's probably not going to serve very well as a reference book.
That's not its goal though, at its core it's an art project and, as that, it achieves what it set out to do. It's visually stunning, the cover is certainly pretty to behold, which is a good thing since that's what you'll be looking at the most if you obtain a copy, and the print quality is top notch.
The quality of the images though, both technically and artistically, is out of the creators' hands. But that is also the goal, to illustrate the collective creative mind and to create a snapshot of the web at the time the book was created.
It's an interesting project and the artists hope to have a small print run for those interested. Unfortunately, the book is so obviously infringing on so many people's copyright that it's a miracle it got printed at all.
In theory, the artists could claim it is all covered by the "fair use" doctrine, but that's US law and they're from the UK where there is no such thing as fair use. In a perfect world, a discussion about copyright would seem absurd around what is obviously an art project, even if it were one to generate money. But this is not the world we live in.
