Google Book Search

There was an interesting article in the Sunday August 13 Washington Post, Search Me? about the Google Book Search project and copyright issues. There is a little on how the book scanning project first came to be, which I had not read before. The discussion of the suit between publishers and Google captures some of the issues but does not address the truly significant problem of "orphaned" works. Those books, out of print, possibly in the public domain, possibly not, represent a huge obstacle to all digitization projects. These books represent around 70% of the books which could be scanned but finding who might control the copyright for any of these books is often quite impossible.