(((Once those books have been ground down into a post-print, searchable digital oatmeal?)))
Link: What Do You Do with a Million Books? .
"We are beginning to see the rise of vast libraries of digital books. The Million Book Project at Carnegie Mellon had as of November 2005 already scanned more than 600,000 books.5 Even more ambitiously, Google has created a consortium of libraries to build a massive digital collection: one of the partners alone – the Harvard University Library system – contains more than 15,000,000 items. Recent research by OCLC has counted the total number of unique books that will be digitized by the Google Print project at over 10.5 million.6 The Open Content Alliance is offering a more transparent framework for mass digitization, and such industry forces as Yahoo and Microsoft are beginning to develop digital collections with millions of books.7 The European Union, both optimistic about the future and fretful about too much American influence on the emerging digital infrastructure, has launched its own plans for a massive digital library. 8
The money seems to be very much available to convert millions of books into digital form....
