[musha68k]

At the very least why not upload the scanned books to the internet archive while already at it?

This is highly disturbing news; is this standard practice? What did Google Books do before?

[qsera]

Yes, this is very disturbing to me. I recently discovered how great old, out of circulation/print can be. Now old abandoned libraries are like a treasure trove to me. If these books are not digitaly preserved, that sounds very sad to me.