The end of the university library as we know it...

The lawsuit between Google, the Author's Guild, and the Association of American Publishers is about to be settled. Here's an excerpt from the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It signals something we've known was coming: the end of the traditional library. In the future, all books will be available online. A person like me won't have to drive to the University of Notre Dame to do research because IWU will pay a fee to let its faculty and students have online access to every book in existence.

Here's an excerpt:
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"If approved by a judge, the accord would allow users of Google Book Search in the United States to see the full texts of books they can read only in snippets now. The deal would also have the potential to put millions more out-of-print or hard-to-find titles within the reach of readers and researchers. Institutions would be able to buy subscriptions so that their students and faculty members could have full access to complete texts. All public libraries in the United States would be given free portals for their patrons. (The settlement does not apply to the use of Google Book Search outside the United States.)

"Users without library or institutional access would pay a fee to preview the full text of a book. Google and the copyright holders—the publishers and authors—would share the proceeds from subscriptions and individual use. Authors and publishers could opt out of the program.
The deal will 'unlock millions of these texts for users,' said David Drummond, chief legal officer of Google, during the teleconference. Google, he said, considered the deal a great leap forward as well. 'Search simply isn’t complete without this content,' he said."