Article: What Ever Happened to Google Books?

Tim Wu writes:

Today, the project sits in a kind of limbo. On one hand, Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). 

I remember when everyone was talking about Google Books. It grabbed our imaginations. As a digitization consultant, I thought it was something we'd be able to learn from. However, the ability to scan millions of books ran into the reality of authors' rights.

If you've not thought about this project for a while, this article sums it all up nicely. Of course, what it doesn't say is whether we'll ever get the access to those 35,000,000 volumes in the way that we want.