From Library Journal
The Last Library Is Greater than Google
By Barbara Fister
The other day a short news item about a conference held at Berkeley on the Google Book Search settlement included a phrase that caught my eye. Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information and a specialist on language and new technologies, said of the Google project, "this is the last library."
The terms of the settlement raise all kinds of issues. Will the Google orphanage unfairly require payments for books that are actually in the public domain? Will there be any privacy provisions for users, or will the Last Library conduct surveillance on your reading habits in order to match your interests to advertising? How expensive will it be to enter the library? Will academic libraries have to sacrifice their book budget so they can subscribe to the One and Only library? And will Google's special relationship with the class of authors and publishers mean we'll never have a second crack at building a digital library that functions differently? ...