It seems like all’s been quiet on the Google Books front for a while.  There’s been little talk of new partners, lawsuits, or just about anything.  But that doesn’t mean nothing’s been happening, as today, Google signaled that it’s scanned (and returned) one million books from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation.

A quick note in case you’re not familiar with the CIC: it’s an association that’s been around since 1958, and its members consist of the traditional Big Ten Conference schools, plus the University of Chicago.

Otherwise, Kim Armstrong, Deputy Director of the Center for Library Initiatives at the CIC, explained what’s taken place by writing on the Inside Google Books blog, "Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index."

Armstrong later noted, "Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide."

Then here’s a really interesting point: "CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. — so this is just the beginning."

That’s bound to be exciting news for a lot of people, considering that the remaining nine million books must cover a whole lot of ground.