The academics have been working on digitizing their book collections with Google’s help. (See Article here) I suspect that, in spite of the fact that Google is ahead of the pack in total books digitized today, there may be a fair number of other groups that get together to digitize collections down the road, and as new books are written and published, most will be available electronically anyway.
In spite of the Copyright Office’s current objections to the original Google book deal, my bet is that the market in the future will push changes in how copyright ownership is managed, or perhaps streamline the management of these interests (for example, by requiring a statutory fee for access payable to the copyright owner).
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