The HathiTrust is a partnership of the academic libraries involved in Google Books and other digitization efforts. They offer the Google-originated scans free t

The HathiTrust is a partnership of the academic libraries involved in Google Books and other digitization efforts. They offer the Google-originated scans free to the public for works that are already in the public domain, and allow university members and research partners to access scans of books that are still under copyright. https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership They're not going to compete with Google in software development, but Google isn't the sole gatekeeper of the book scans.