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by miker64 2319 days ago
But we won't have an assistant that digested the world's libraries. We'll have an advertising company gatekeeping the digitally digested world's libraries.

I think that's worth worry about. As well, if Google in their drive to monetize content that they don't own, causes the various publishers and IP owners to go on the legal attack, any other option/startup will be quickly dissuaded from building a similar, or better, assistant.
1 comments
philipkglass 2319 days ago
The HathiTrust is a partnership of the academic libraries involved in Google Books and other digitization efforts. They offer the Google-originated scans free to the public for works that are already in the public domain, and allow university members and research partners to access scans of books that are still under copyright.

https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership

They're not going to compete with Google in software development, but Google isn't the sole gatekeeper of the book scans.

link