Stanford and Google to Make Library Books Available OnlineStanford University today announced an ambitious plan to cooperate with Google Inc. in digitizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books from the shelves of Stanford libraries and making them available to readers worldwide and without charge.
"This is a great leap forward," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University Librarian, and publisher of both the Stanford University Press and the HighWire Press (Stanford's online co-publishing service for scholarly journals). "We have been digitizing texts for years now to make them more accessible and searchable, but with books, as opposed to journals, such efforts have been severely limited in scope for both technical and financial reasons. The Google arrangement catapults our effective digital output from the boutique scale to the truly industrial. Through this program and others like it, Stanford intends to promote learning and to stimulate innovation."
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