Google and the British Library have a long-term collaboration agreement.

Despite the difficulties with the Google Books project, Google continues to work in the direction of digitizing books, and today it became known about the next achievement of the corporation. Google Inc. has signed a long-term collaboration agreement with the British Library. As part of the collaboration, digital copies of 250,000 books will be posted online, starting from 18th century editions.

Of course, this is a small fraction of the treasures that are stored in the British Library (about 150 million editions), however, users will get access to fairly valuable publications, most of which will be available for free. The fact is that with respect to most of the publications, copyright has already expired.
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Publications that will be digitized include books, magazines, manuscripts, and more. By the way, the agreement does not have a financial background, i.e. This is not a commercial agreement. Google Inc. has already entered into similar agreements with more than 40 libraries around the world. As a result of such cooperation, publications sometimes get to the Network, to which only a few have access, and now many millions of people can familiarize themselves with bibliographic rarities “live”.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the Google Books project is going through hard times, because the right holders started the second round of the fight against this project. We will not now discuss on the topic of who is right and who is to blame, but, unfortunately, many valuable publications will not be able to get on the Web, because their authors (or companies that own the rights to publications) are against digitizing these works.

Via telegraph.co.uk