Reflections on Google Book Search: You Can’t Put the Google Back Into the Bottle « The Scholarly Kitchen

"[S]ettlement or no, we have the HathiTrust, which grew directly out of Google’s scanning project. Focusing at this time on public domain works and with true zeal for detecting which orphan works are indeed in the public domain, the HathiTrust has now grown to a diverse collaboration of many research libraries, which share and scan books. The digital collection that the HathiTrust is putting together has no peer. It is, in my view, one of the most interesting, ambitious, and commendable projects going on today in the media world. Settlement or no, we would not have it without Google. Or we could point to some of the international digitization projects....It was the Google project that prompted Robert Darnton to embark on a quest for support to build a national digital library....Even if Google were to pack up and go home, even if the negotiating team would simply stop, acknowledging defeat, this is now the world that Google built, settlement or no settlement...."