The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story about a Google Grant Program for Studies of Its Digitized Books. Many of us have been encouraging Google to open Google Books to research projects, including crowdsourcing projects that could improve the content. Google should be congratulated on creating this program and actually providing support for experiments.
Understandably some worry about humanists becoming dependent on Google Books – the worry is that we will “lock-in” our new research practices to one data-set, that of Google. I doubt this is really going to be a problem. It is still early in the development of new analytical practices to see lock-in. Further, the quality of the Google texts is poor (the price of doing it on a large scale was that there was no correction and no markup), that there is room for other data-sets from commercial ones to open projects.