bruce said:

On the plus side, Google now makes PDFs of most of the full view books with high resolution images

that is a good thing. but what makes it even better is that michigan has started making the digital text available too. so instead of just settling for looking at pictures of pages, we can now begin to create honest-to-goodness e-books -- with text that can reflow, and be searched and copied... this week i'll be making posts to the bookpeople listserve that walk people there through the process of doing that. my goal is to digitize a book in _one_ hour. will i succeed? i suppose it depends on how good my automatic tools are. the proof, as you all should know by now, is in the pudding. *** as to the tempest in this teapot here, it's all good... i do appreciate michael's efforts with the world book-fairs. i also appreciate google's massive book-scanning project, which provides us plenty of lemons to make our lemonade, and i appreciate the library at the university of michigan for giving us a powerful lemon-press to make that lemonade... a million e-books might be as little as a million hours away, which puts them _much_ closer than they were 5 years ago. -bowerbird