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So, I took a long slow look at ten of the examples from Godmar's file. Nothing I saw disabused me of my opinion: "No preview" pages on Google Book Search are very weak tea. Are they worthless? Not always. But they usually are. And, unfortunately, you generally need to read the various references pages carefully before you know you were wasting your time. Some examples: Risks in Chemical Units (http://books.google.com/books?id=7ctpAAAACAAJ) has one glancing, un-annotated reference in the footnotes of another, apparently different book. How Trouble Made the Monkey Eat Pepper (http://books.google.com/books?id=wLnGAAAACAAJ) sports three references from other books, two in snippet view and one with no view. Two are bare-bones bibliographic mentions in an index of Canadian children's books and an index of Canadian chidren's illustrators. The third is another bare-bones mention in a book in Sinhalese. > If the patron is sitting on a computer (which, given this discussion, they obviously are), the > path of least resistance dictates that a journal article will be used before a book. An excellent example. Let's imagine you were doing reference-desk work and a student were to come up to you with a question about a topic. You have two sources you can send them to—the book itself in all its glory, and another source. The other source is the Croatian-language MySpace page of someone whose boyfriend read a chapter of the book once, five years ago. You're not sure if the blog mentions the book, but it might. That something provides the path of least resistance isn't an argument for something. It depends on where the path goes.