The New Yorker has a story by Jeffrey Toobin on Google’s staggeringly ambitious and hugely contentious Google Books project, in which the company intends to digitize and make fully searchable more than 30 million books over the next decade. (Toobin quotes the Google vice-president in charge of the project who describes the undertaking as Google’s “moon shot.” The lengthy article details the legal challenges some publishers are making to Google Books, and the possible dangers inherent in a possible cash settlement on Google’s part.
The article is as interesting for the information on the project and on the murky history of U.S. copyright law as it is for the glimpses into Google corporate life: pajama days (which most employees rightly spurn), free food 24 hours a day, and a 10,000-strong workforce, to which 50 people are apparently added every week.
