Re: Book-scanning projects - a question

["SANFORD G THATCHER" <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Many university presses, some in cooperation with libraries on 
their campuses, have been busily digitizing pre-2000 (after which 
books were "born digital") books for some years, in anticipation 
of selling them as e-books or licensing them through aggregators, 
if they are not large enough to do direct selling themselves (in 
the manner of Oxford Scholarship Online). Even before then, 
presses began sending older titles to companies like Questia, 
netLibrary, and ebrary, which then digitized them and sold them 
to their own customers. So there are now large numbers of 
post-1923 titles in electronic form and more are becoming 
available every year.

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 11:17 PM, "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> 
wrote:

>Here's something I've always been curious about...
>
>Most of the book-scanning projects are focusing on digitizing 
>works in the public domain, right? And the public domain is 
>basically books published before 1923, right?
>
>So, aren't most of these projects the equivalent of building a 
>physical library collection of pre-1923 books?
>
>I realize that Google is THE big exception here. They're 
>scanning in-copyright works. But it remains to be seen, pending 
>the Google books settlement,what sort of access we all will get 
>to these works. Google may well wind up being largely a pre-1923 
>library collection, with some exceptions regarding access to the 
>full text of post-1923 works.
>
>Anyway, like I said...something I've always been curious about, 
>so I thought I'd finally ask. :-)
>
>Bernie Sloan