Over the last 5-10 years, the Internet has become the primary resource for information for everything from financial planning to healthcare to food recipes- and hence there is value in digitizing the huge amounts of information residing in paper books and journals, so that its available on the Internet. Many companies and organizations, including search engines are working with book publishing houses and libraries to digitize their collections of books and journals/periodicals.

Here’s a video by WebProNews that speaks with Google’s Gabriel Stricker, Brewster Kahle of the Open Content Alliance, and the Boston Library Consortium’s Executive Director Barbara Preece about their efforts in this direction. Now, there have been a few controversial issues among the various platforms, but all agree that the common goal is to increase the availability of paper books and periodicals in the online world.