The Atlantic:
You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.
Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.
This is such a sad story and a loss for all of us here and now but it will eventually happen.
I love how you link to an article about freely-available media to a site that won’t display if you have an ad blocker.
Readers may want to search out Ursula K LeGuin’s take on what happened and why. Suffice it to say that that many authors that depend on their back catalogs for their income were not amused by Google’s “better to beg forgiveness” actions.