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Product manager Adam Smith
reports in the official Google
blog that Google is ramping up its Google Print For Libraries program right on schedule (November 1 after a hiatus).
Interestingly, Smith refers to the project goal as “our initiative to build a card catalog of books…” Indeed,
according to Google’s many reassuring descriptions of how the service will funtion, the scanned excerpts will work
similarly to a card catalog. Of course, you don’t need to copy an entire book to add it to a traditional card
catalog—and that’s exactly what troubles publishing trade groups. I wonder if the Authors Guild and AAP lawsuits would
be proceeding if Google had (cut me slack on this for a sec) purchased every book before scanning it. Maybe that’s
Google’s ultimate path through this mess: Create a world-class physical library paired with a state-of-the-art scanned
and searchable database. University libraries, of course, have been collecting rare and now out-of-print editions for
decades, resulting an collections that can’t be duplicated from scratch.
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