Just a quick comment regarding Google Books. Their project is indeed ambitious and, ultimately will result in some messy work. However, I don’t know that they are the ones to blame when it comes to quality in scans. In my own experience in reviewing some of these works (especially Civil War unit histories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century), I have found that scans are being done by libraries (Harvard comes to mind in at least two instances). The only time that Google does the scanning is when somebody wants their book in Google Books specifically to be presented as a “preview.” In that case, the author either scans their own book and sends in the scans or sends Google a copy of the book. When the book is sent to Google, they dismantle it in order to make higher quality scans.

Best,

Robert Moore
for that, m, I do know that

Maybe the real issue is that the notion of gatekeeper, owner, first-class member needs to be ditched in favor of more useful, functioning, and robust models. Think open-source.