What does all this book scanning and archiving mean for search?

There's been a lot of articles lately about Google Print, or scanning of libraries for online availability. So far, all I hear is what people think about it. Most say that they like it or believe that it's a good move for educational institutions. But what's the deeper issue and what is Google's motivation for doing such a program.

First of all, Google is no longer a company that is doing things for the betterment of humanity without a payday on it. On that you can be sure. Everything is for profit and that just fine. But don't think that just because they're doing something like library scanning and indexing that it's done for general good. Because Google is a public company now, everything is done for profit. So what's the profit motive here?

I think that there must be an agreement between these school libraries and Google where Google offers to do this for free but will charge for book research on the back end. I'm sure the schools will get a small fee for every book viewed online as well. But the majority of the money will go to Google and they will have a control over many of the electronic assets from there on. It's a good strategy for Google in the long term. What it might mean is that Google will have control of electronic books from several major libraries making them a super library from which many people who do research will be glad to pay.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have access to such things, but does it make sense to sell out information cheaply to large corporations. In some ways, I think these educational institutions are doing just that. It all sounds so good getting something like this getting done for nothing, but at what price in the future? Should these libraries be selling something as valuable as their information so cheap?

I'm also thinking about Google as an entity that could be more intrusive into our lives that we want it to be in the future. I hope that there are other companies looking at doing what Google is doing. The only way to have monopolistic control of something is to encourage competition. To that end, our government should be providing tax incentives to bring more competition to the table. But I'm sure they'll be too late someday and have an inquiry as to why certain search entities have too much control of information.

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