What happened to that in the end? I heard they wanted to digitize the worlds books and then it just petered out at some point and heard nothing about it. Did they continue or was it spun to Internet Archive to do?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

My understanding is the project led into Google Books. Google fought many legal cases and ultimately won but their enthusiasm to scan more books seems to have waned. Google basically convinced judges that by only letting people see a few pages, it fell under fair use, but then that meant you didn't get a giant library because you couldn't read the whole book.

There's an article about it here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-of-university-library-books

Also see https://www.hathitrust.org/about/ which is mentioned in the article.