According to Google Books, it’s the year Raymond Chandler‘s Killer in the Rain was published, along with Stephen King‘s Christine and a landmark biography of Bob Dylan — not to mention the Italian edition of Freakonomics and Portuguese edition Super Crunchers. These are mistakes, obviously, and they point to even more troubling errors that bedevil Google’s digital library project, as Geoffrey Nunberg explains. Update | 4:51 p.m. See a response from Google’s metadata team here. [%comments]
1899: A Very Good Year for Books
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I do hope you mean 1983, or Stephen King would truly have accomplished quite a feat! Is he a vampire too?
Woot! Party like it’s 1899!
Nina, did you read the whole entry before writing your comment?
Google Books is notorious among librarians for having absolutely atrocious metadata. Without good metadata digitization projects are basically useless, so this is quite troubling.
Isn’t it obvious that this is an easily correctable problem that will probably be solved by Google crowdsourcing?
Given a choice between having at least the books contents searchable and not having anything up until everything is tagged correctly, I would easily choose the former.
Frankly,
I prefer books– their smell, taste, feel etc and the ability to correct mistakes, make comments etc as one reads along.
I manage Google’s metadata team, and responded to Geoff’s comments on his blog at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701#comment-41758. And by the way, the 1899 problem will be fixed in a week.
Oh, Nina. My dear Nina. Nina, Nina, Nina. In haste to snark, you’ve come up dark.