More digitizations at Google Books?

An interesting email has reached me, noticing that work seems to have resumed at Google Books: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Google Books has been adding new material this year from a number of university libraries that have entered their partnership program. As could be expected, the [most likely] reason is that they are desperate to get more printed material to train their LLMs, and libraries are happy if big corporations put up the money and resources to scan their collections. Here’s a very recent article about digitization at Delaware University. Lately I have seen many books I couldn’t find before with digitization date from around [last April], from Oxford and other places…. This seems entirely plausible, and also good news in a way. It’s been known for a while that some AI companies are scanning books. An “AI” system seems to be basically a search engine with a chatbot on the front, which is why Google panicked when AI came along. It’s the same market. Naturally the…