Google is amaz­ing. But there’s one seri­ous con­cern (not prob­lem, but con­cern in the sense of “some­thing we need to con­sider”). Google Book Search will become a stun­ning addi­tion to the arma­men­tar­ium, but is full of first drafts of scanned books: full of errors and miss­ing pages.

Google Maps is a won­der­ful resource too. But look where I ended up stay­ing the night:

Look at the Renais­sance where I’m stay­ing (blue “X”) and the adja­cent dark gray build­ing to the west. Give you a headache?

I know what hap­pened, of course: two aer­ial (satel­lite?) pho­tographs taken from dif­fer­ent points on dif­fer­ent days were stitched together, and quite rightly so: we have a fine-​​scale map now cov­er­ing vast tracts of Seattle.

But here’s the kicker: Will this ever get “fixed”, or will we undergo a cul­tural adaptation—a blind­ness, as it were—to the phys­i­cal impos­si­bil­ity of this sort of image? Will we all go through Google Book Search and replace those miss­ing and dam­aged dig­i­tized pages, or will we adapt to their lack by sim­ply call­ing it good enough?

Is this how maps will look in the future? Escheresque?