I don't get it. I often search for technical information and get to stuff indexed from within books on books.google.com - that's really awesome, and I'm not sure what you find sad here?
The parent is sad that Google Play is on the front page of books.google.com, and Google's 'noble effort' is now linked to their commercial Google Play product. This is silly though. Google has their "book search" product and their "buy books through Google Play" product. It's reasonable to assume that some people might end up at books.google.com when looking for the Google Play books section.
