What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books? - August 10, 2017

What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?

By Jennifer Howard     Aug 10, 2017

edSurge: Postsecondary learning

"It was a crazy idea: Take the bulk of the world’s books, scan them, and create a monumental digital library for all to access. That’s what Google dreamed of doing when it embarked on its ambitious book-digitizing project in 2002. It got part of the way there, digitizing at least 25 million books from major university libraries.

But the promised library of everything hasn’t come into being. An epic legal battle between authors and publishers and the Internet giant over alleged copyright violations dragged on for years. A settlement that would have created a Book Rights Registry and made it possible to access the Google Books corpus through public-library terminals ultimately died, rejected by a federal judge in 2011. And though the same judge ultimately dismissed the case in 2013, handing Google a victory that allowed it to keep on scanning, the dream of easy and full access to all those works remains just that."

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