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You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that's ever been published. Books still in print you'd have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.
At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You'd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you'd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.
It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. "The universal library has been talked about for millennia," Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, has said. "It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution." In the spring of 2011, it seemed we'd amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.
"This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life," one eager observer wrote at the time.
On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century's worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an "international catastrophe." When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who'd had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:39PM
There isn't any ASCAP for books that could sort out the royalties. Unlike composers who, I believe, almost all sign up with a publishing company, authors don't all sign up with Author's Guild or other independent organization that could track the "reads" or "views". ASCAP (as I understand it) was formed as a reaction to "free plays" of songs on the radio, in stores, and in other settings, long ago.
Some (no idea what fraction) of those 25 million books that Google scooped up are:
a) still under copyright
b) still making income for the authors -- some books keep selling and generating steady (if small) royalties.
I should know, the reference book I co-authored, (c) 1994, still pays me about $5K/year because it's been picked up as a text for an engineering elective at a number of universities. Yes, I got a little lucky. And yes, it's available as a crappy scan, but my publisher does a fairly good job of keeping it off the more popular warez sites.