Today, Slate investigates the possibility that Google Book Search means the end of plagiarism as we know it (no!), for the simple reason that it makes it possible to find out, with a mere button-click, whether a sentence appears in more than one book. We'll be sad to see plagiarism go — it was very, very fun while it lasted. We do gleefully anticipate some fun gotcha moments as the new technology becomes more widespread, though. In fact, just for kicks, we plugged a favorite recent phrase into Google Book Search:

This image was lost some time after publication.


100% original, alas.

Google Book Search: A Plagiarist's Nightmare [Slate]