Big Ten Schools Recommit to Google Books Project

CNN reports that twelve major universities around the country have agreed to have substantial portions of their libraries included in the Google Books project. Around ten million volumes are expected to be included in the project. Participating schools include the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. "The committee said Google will scan and index materials 'in a manner consistent with copyright law.' Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books. Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries. "

Comments

Re:Off-topic: Big Eleven

[catmistake]

for that extra push over the cliff

My question is:

[thegnu]

Do we REALLY want their books?

While under the safe shade of the off-topicness of the parent comment, let me say how disturbingly natural it has just recently become for me to add HTML tags.

Re:Copyright Law

[The_Wilschon]

I'm all for the book indexing, but still, you can't put a robots.txt on a book. This is an important difference which allows website operators to opt out of web indexing. Book copyright owners are apparently being denied the privilege of opting out of having their books indexed. Of course, the fact that most website operators don't opt out is salient as well...