Most of the way down an article in the New York Times – The Coming Search Wars (MS vs Google) comes an interesting revelation:
“an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, Google now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.”
It’s just a pity the number of years we have to wait to get ahold of copyright material keeps lengthening…
