This is the sort of thing that keeps me a big fan of Google. Who else would undertake to digitize 15th century Italian manuals? Google have redrawn the traditio

This is the sort of thing that keeps me a big fan of Google. Who else would undertake to digitize 15th century Italian manuals? Google have redrawn the traditional lines separating commercial activity, academic research, and public service. Speaking of Google books, our local university library has many books available online, especially up-to-date research literature that is hard to get in print form. You can only read this stuff if you're sitting at a workstation in the library, or if you have a student/faculty account. That's reasonable. But they use proprietary e-book software that is so awful and clunky that it's unusable. I keep thinking about that crappy software company that was good at nothing but selling to university executives, and wishing the library could just cut a deal to use Google Books instead.