Quentin Hardy at Forbes.com has a new article on the Google Book settlement. Hardy suggests that the real value in Google Books is monitoring traffic to books, not the actual monetization of the books. From the article:
Reading and research are, in effect, acts of linking, involving memory association–heretofore acts of individual minds that Google’s computers can now mimic. It is a powerful thing to grant a single company (or prohibit others from doing.)
