We were displeased to learn Columbia University is tumbling down the Google tube:

Columbia University has partnered with Google, Inc. to digitize select public domain printed volumes in the University Libraries’ collections and make them available online using Google Book Search. The digitization project will provide teachers, students, scholars, and readers around the world with an unprecedented ability to search, locate, and read books from the University’s collections. The digital collection resulting from this project significantly advances Columbia’s ability to serve its academic community, as well as readers worldwide.

Why is Columbia giving up their collection to Google?

Why can’t Columbia University digitize their own library and make it available online?

Why let Google be the arbiter of scholarship and research and the book depository of choice?

Google is a for-profit entity and their scanning of books in the public domain will be certainly be monetized — and that inevitability will galvanize the misplaced good intentions of these historic universities that are all too lazy to know better than to toss their libraries away on the internet under the Google banner.

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