Digitizing Books

The Daily Dish has an interesting article up about the future of books and Google’s effort to digitize them. Andrew Sullivan quotes another writer who wrote of the recent settlement allowing Google to digitize thousands of books that:

No one can predict what will happen. We can only read the terms of the settlement and guess about the future. If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud? Would we not prefer a world in which this immense corpus of digitized books is accessible, even at a high price, to one in which it did not exist?

Perhaps, but the settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company.

Here’s the link to the original article that Sullivan pulls from which is also an interesting read although it is quite long.