I'm a huge fan of Project Gutenberg, one of the Internet's largest depositories of public domain literature, because you can find some amazing treasures in there; just yesterday, for example, they not only uploaded new editions of The Prisoner of Zenda and House of the Seven Gables, but Edward Dicey's Rome in 1860, which turns out to be as much fun (at least in its opening scenes) as Joe Mitchell on the subject of New York in the 1940s. So I was pleasantly surprised by yesterday's WSJ online Q&A with Michael Hart, the Project's director. It delves into how the all-volunteer effort will keep on keeping on in the Google Book Search era: "Google didn't want to have anything to do with us. They want to do their own project." Hart also compares the two main methods of getting the books online:

"I once typed in a book that was 1,000 pages and it took nine months. Then I scanned the sequel, which was about 750 pages, and it took maybe three weeks. It's a huge amount more efficient, and a huge amount less fun."