Yahoo! with OpenContentAlliance in competition with Google - I do not see it!

Today, the news agencies annouced that Yahoo! organized in the OpenContentAlliance is planning to digitize books and make them searchable and availible on the internet. For now they are talking about non-copyrighted books.

Why does so many people claim that this move competes with Google?
Scanning copyrighted books Google got in some legal trouble but it offers them a unique and very clever business model - Placing and selling more adds and the books itself.

Yahoo! on the other hand takes the path of least resistence and scann non-copyrighted books. This will save them a lot of trouble and I am sure they will start scanning copyrighted books too as soon as the legal questions are answered. But this idea is old just have a look at the Gutenberg Project which is by the way a very nice source of american classics.

I welcome the efforts of Yahoo! to organize the efforts to digitize non-copyrighted books. They are strong enough to boost the development but once again they show that Yahoo! is second Google first class.

As consumers we can only keep our fingers crossed for Google in the law suit against some authors.

Google has also woken up Europe which is a good thing for its citizens.