British Library to put all non-copyrighted works online

I don’t think there’s any other way to describe this than "win".

The UK’s national library has clinched a deal with Google to include texts dating back to the 18th Century. The library’s collection includes around 14m books – second only to the USA’s Library of Congress – and it holds some 920,000 journal and newspaper titles. The deal with Google will enable readers to view, search and copy works – where the copyright has expired – at no charge. Google will also make the books available through its own portal.

With all those texts online we’re sure to see a rise in automatically generated books on the Amazon Kindle and other ebook systems, but that’s a by-product of a smart decision to make the raw information free.