“Most of the tech adopters out there are familiar with Google Books, the free service offered by Google that scanned millions of books and published them online. It seems that just when everyone was getting comfortable with Google Books the lawsuits came rolling in.
“The ‘Digital Public Library of America’ will, well, provide a Google-Books-like experience but without the hassles of lawsuits. Harvard university librarian and member of the DPLA steering committee Robert Darnton recently made a ‘promise’ that the project would launch in April of 2013. (Specific much, no?).
“Essentially the Digital Public Library of America will centralize the academic, publishing and archiving projects that we see going on in many different niche areas related to book-based-IP. Who knows what to expect with the oscillation between emergence of cornerstone events in this arena such as the Creative Commons Licences, Google Books, the DPLA or even anarchist-based sites like aaaaargh.com. Techcrunch’s Devin Coldewey sums it up nicely:
We’re still in the early stages of this archival process; even the Internet Archive and Google’s massive book collection are, in some ways, rather crude first steps. The DPLA is ambitious and may face serious obstacles, but it’s to be expected when they’re making it up as they go along.
From the post on Dornon+Roberston Digital Marketecture, “Digital Public Library of America” Becomes the New Google Books in April 2013