Comment by nkurz
7 days ago
> I don't understand why these companies haven't just licensed the scans Google has already done.
Because for the vast majority of the books, Google doesn't have the legal right to license those scans. It would be legal if the books were out of copyright, but despite the connotation of "rare books" those generally aren't the books we're talking about. Further, in the cases where Google didn't destroy the original of the book they scanned, their scanned copy may be considered infringing under the new standard, so Google doesn't want call undue attention to what they have.
yeah, I think most of this really stems from people streatching the use of "rare books". The cool rare books google scanned one page at a time were borrowed from a library because they are rare and or valuable and usually old (out of copyright by a long time).