There is a lot of talk about the Library Project of Google in collaboration with University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library, and Oxford University. The Project will have Google digitize the holdings of the participating libraries and have the content searchable via print.google.com. Currently, books in the public domain can be browsed entirely. Other books are limited to a few pages and one is limited to how many books are avaliable and users are monitored. An authors’ guild have sued Google claiming copyright violation and would like for Google to ask every single copyright holder to give their consent. Some points to Fair Use should be sufficient to allow Google to proceed. Many logically concludes many more will be sold because links provided by Goggle’s Ad-Sense.
On the Media have piece(mp3) about this and Siva Vaidhyanathan argued that he would prefer the Library of Congress spearhead such a project on behalf of us all and not a behemoth of a company using proprietary methods. I totally agree. As much as I accept Google doesn’t intend to be evil but the biggest kid in the class is always feared. The French government feared the anglo-centric nature of the project so they will have their own program, featuring books written in french. And today, Yahoo and some others(including the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England) announced the Open Content Alliance which will similarly digitize library contents and make them searchable and downloadable, but the alliance will initially(my emphasis) provided contents from book in public domain.
I would like to see our local libraries invest in similar open projects for contents that are at least Florida specific.
fyi: there is some talk about something like this, focusing more on rare/special collections and such. maybe, sort of. it seems to be in the baby stages, though. i am keeping my ears open.