Barry reports that University of Wisconsin-Madison Library has joined the Google Library Program.

ince Google has been quiet and we know little on how the scanning is going almost 2 years after after the program was launched (vs. the limited previews that come direct from the publisher and are also part of Amazon's Search Inside the Book) I wonder if the same book will be scanned many times? Let's say Stanford, UW-Madison, and U of Michigan have the same book. Will it be scanned once, twice, three times? If each has different editions will all three be available? Even if this is not the case, will all three versions be accessible?

True, the Google press release is clear
(http://www.google.com/press/annc/uniwisconsin_books.html) that the full text
of public domain materials will be completely visible and searchable, I'm not sure if the public understands if books in copyright and scanned from a library, the searcher will only see a snippet. What is the length of that snippet? Of course, these copyright rules will also be different in different countries.

http://books.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about.html

The other day the co-founder of YouTube said:
“Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating a new clip culture."

Our we also starting a new book "snippet" culture?

via SEW Blog
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/blog

I could imagine that several versions of the same book have the bonus of optimized OCR (maybe a letter is hard to decipher in one book, but easy in another), though you'd expect Google to filter out dupes before they scan them...