The news spreads quickly all over the web: Google plans to keep its highly trained personnel busy by having them soon scan an insane number of dusty paper books. The holdings of the US' leading research libraries (Harvard, U of Michigan, Stanford, New York Public Library) and of Oxford U library are to be converted into digital files that would be freely searchable over the web.
According to Stanford University's head librarian Keller, "within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today."
When we talk about Google, don't we talk about search results that only display small excerpts of the whole? What do you guys think? Is that truly the long-predicted global virtual library that Bill Gates did envision 10 years ago?