paidContent's Jeff John Robert's New Book Takes a Look Inside Google's Engineering to Create the World’s Biggest Library

In The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to Create the World’s Biggest Library (GigaOM, 2012), Jeff John Roberts "describes the technological and legal twists and turns of the story through the people affected by it: the authors who feared losing rights to their work, publishers facing lost revenue, technologists pushing for a world where all written knowledge is digital, and librarians who believe in open access to information." From the blurb:

At the dawn of the e-book era, librarians predicted it would take 1,000 years to scan the world’s books. Then, one company set about to do it in five.
 
Even by the search giant’s standards, it was a bold move. As Google beat a path to the door of the world’s libraries and proceeded to scan everything from War and Peace to Watership Down, the company’s quest to build the largest library triggered a power struggle of massive proportions, as everyone from Amazon to the Justice Department and writers across the world rushed to halt the project.
 
In this compelling book, Jeff Roberts gives the first detailed account of Google’s grand plan to build a modern day Library of Alexandria and its subsequent undoing, and shows how Google’s gambit changed the way we view knowledge in the digital era.

For an excerpt see The technological imperative which includes links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes. At $2.99 for the ebook, you can't go wrong. Highly recommended. [JH]