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Google Books is a service that allows searches of full-texts of books and magazines that have been scanned by Google. These texts are stored into a digital database and with the use of "character recognition", a user can locate any textual material. This website discusses the legal aspect to Universities access and use of Google Books. With a proposed agreement between AAP and Google Book Search, the proposal was unfortunately rejected.

This article explains the dispute between Google and publishers here in the United States. As we have seen in class, Google Books offers internet users the ability to search through their database of scanned books. Publishers are fighting that Google is violating copyright laws by scanning these books and letting people have free open access. Although the project itself is causing an uproar, publishers as well as authors are being given the opportunity to decide what books are included in this project.

This article explains how Google Books is teaming with digital humanities scholars to spread digital sharing for public use. The company announced they will bankroll 12 university based research projects. Google has been scanning books since 2004, accumulating to over 12 million books. One of the projects Google is supporting is called "Reframing the Victorians," which plans to find out if the Victorian era had an optimistic population by crowdsourcing materials. Google has decided to use one million to support digital humanities in the next two years.

Tim Hitchcock begins this article by stating that books are dead. He goes on to explain his statement, qualifying that the process of creating a 'book' is lengthy and redundant, especially in the digital age. In our current state, we still think of data in reference to standard book form (book, chapter, page, line). He also criticizes modern humanists' approach/integration of scholarship and technology. Hitchcock believes that many utilize technical shortcuts (such as Google Books), but refuse to recognize it. Or they reference an article that they found online, but cite the paper version. His greatest criticism is the path that he believes digital humanities is going. He beleves that it is following the progress of the book too closely and that in an attempt to make things accessible, they have not utilized the versatility of digital publishing. He notes that how we currently view books depends on how digital humanities progresses. At the end of the article, Hitchcock describes his original tone and intention of the article. He also describes the editing and peer-review process.

Blogger Dan Cohen discusses how Google is good for history. Historians are simply a group of people who dig through information from the past, put it all together as possible facts or theories, and then share. Cohen then teases Google for a bit when bringing attention to the hand scans that can be occasionally found in Google Books. Their is a question of quality and direction.

After making millions from his internet inventions, this article from Forbes, discusses how Brewster Kahle and Google are constantly butting heads. Brewster Kahle believes that his open access of books restricts Google from having optimum control over data, such as texts. Most of the scans that are available in Kahle's Archive, are from Google. Although Kahle has been compiling his library since 1996, Google was not incorporated until 1998. Kahle's Archive is now offering a service called Bookserver that allows anyone to upload their literary texts and loan it to others.

This is an interview with Andrew Stauffer, the director of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship at the University of Virginia, which is one of the most important projects in the Digital Humanities field. Through this project, he is exploring how books where written in the past by looking at the human interaction taking place on the pages. That is, he examines messages recorded through annotations by both readers and authors. He is also currently working on examining the effect that Google Books is having on libraries and what information is being lost as we move from analog to digital. Despite the push towards the digital age, Stauffer believes that we will still be reading physical books for many more years.

Matthew Ingram discusses the recent ruling on the Author's Guild's copyright infringement lawsuit. The author points out the decisive nature of the ruling, and goes on to explain the reasons that the project clearly falls under the protection of fair use. He argues that this ruling follows the intent of copyright law, to promote research and knowledge.

This article discusses Microsoft's departure, for lack of potential business, from the digitization of books. He argues that Google's vast lead in this area will allow them to continue to dominate it with its competitors failing to find sufficient outside funding. The article concludes hoping for a joint funding by leading institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

This article gives a brief overview of the environment surrounding the HathiTrust litigation, and gives some added insight to the cases in which Google has been involved. It specifically notes Google's exclusion from the Orphan Works project, citing Judge Denny Chin's assertion that private parties should not be allowed to "establish a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books.

In this short description, reCAPTCHA is described as a free service that aims to digitize media, such as books, radio shows, and newspapers. With the ability to determine if the user is actually human, the archive is attempting to archive basic human knowledge and make information more accessible.

Brett Zongker of Huffington Post reports how the $1 million federal grant for the Digital Public Library of America helps spread digital humanities for the nation. The plan is not only to digitize books, but to build systems for libraries and incorporate partnerships such as Google Books to maximize free access for everyone. The reality is that such a project will take more than a one million dollar donation, but it is a growing start to this digital library. Zongker reports the possibility of incorporating the European Union's digital library (Europeana digital library collection) with the Digital Public Library of America.

"In Defense of Data" presents two articles, "The Digital Inhumanities?" by Scott Selisker and "Imaginary Targets" by Holger Schott Syme, in response to an article by Stephen Marche, "Literature is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities." Selisker's essay focuses primarily on dismantling the idea that digitization removes the human element from interpretation and enforces a quasi-authoritarian view of literature. Syme's essay addresses both Marche's misunderstanding of the motivations of the movement against Google Book's digitization efforts as well as Marche's inaccurate depiction of modern literary research in the wake of digital humanities.