Google Book Scan Project Slows Down

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting a slowdown by Google in their quest to scan books in academic libraries.  Google has scanned some 20 million books so far.  Comments from librarians in the articles indicate that the slowdown is somewhat natural as the project has matured.  Rather than digitizing entire stack sections the company is working on individual titles, likely to avoid duplication in the digital library.  The article notes that some of the digitization efforts have shifted to European collections.  There is no indication as to whether the book scanning litigation has anything to do with this.  Maybe Google is simply running out of books to scan.  [MG]