The digitisation of print publications began on a small scale. In 2005 it entered a new phase, mass digitisation, with the beginning of Google's Books programme. This aimed to convert whole collections and libraries into electronic form. A US challenge to Google's digitisation plans in 2005 led to a complex legal dispute, between the company and authors, publishers and others, which remains unresolved. The advantages of the revised 'Google Books Settlement' (November 2009) are described, as well as the serious objections to it: these include uncertainties about ownership and use of the digitised texts and their long-term preservation, the quality of digitisation, monopoly of mass digitisation activity, and the fact that Google is not a permanent trusted institution. Alternatives to Google are analysed from the point of view of libraries and others wishing to digitise collections: these include public sponsorship and private partnerships. Future uses of the product of mass digitisation are hard to predict. Among them may be novel ways of analysing large corpora of unstructured text, and substantial interaction with contributor-users.
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