It's going to happen.
Google Print is now in beta, as you no doubt have heard on the news. Also Amazon is unveiling a project whose direction is apparently to try to sell us partial access to what we only need a little bit of. The project which the news media are presenting as Yahoo's, to hype a competition between Google and Yahoo, is actually the Open Content Alliance and will be administered by the Internet Archive. A good many major libraries-- including the Research Libraries Group, Columbia, Emory, and the University of California-- who are choosing NOT to participate in the Google project are going to be working with OCA. Peter Suber's SPARC newsletter has a long and careful description and comparison of the two different approaches.
This is a fizzy time for book lovers. Suddenly, just in the past year, free access to the contents of books is precipitating onto the web. Not just a few, or those done as labors of love (like the 16,000 titles assembled by Project Gutenberg over the past 35 years) but a lot of books. Really this post exists to give you the following quote from Peter Suber's article: "The number of free online full-text journal articles is growing steadily and it's likely that its percentage relative to toll-access journal articles is also growing. However, the percentage of books that are free online may soon exceed the percentage of journal articles that are free online. A year or two ago that would have been most unexpected." (Emphasis added.)
We'll be exploring Google Print, figuring out what's in there and what the consequences are of current technology and copyright constraints (among other aspects). We'll let you know how that goes.
PS This post is already out of date. We keep finding more developments, announcements, activity.
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