Google doesn't have Amazons connection to booksellers, but they have a good connection to academia, and now Google will start digitising university libraries, starting with Harvard's library and continuing with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. There will be onine access to works in the public domain, but obviously the advantages of that is much, much less than it could be because of insane copyright extension legislation and because Lessig lost Eldred. How sad.

Obviously an initiative like this doesn't work very well for closed source (technology dead) material, and on the other hand this material presents a major upgrade to all the material that is available, so maybe this is a way to show owners of technology dead material how wrong they are in keeping their material out of the hands of potential users.