As Judge Pierre Leval emphasized throughout his ruling for the Appellate Court, as audacious as Google Books appeared at its inception, it seems less monumental today. Although Google did tip entire library shelves into the scanner without regard for copyright status—triggering an unsurprising revolt from authors and publishers—the tech giant only shows small “snippets” of in-copyright works. The full digitized books are walled-off, making only certain uses possible. Researchers can fact-check using Google Books, or they can examine the number of times particular words and phrases are mentioned in the corpus each year, but they can’t really read Google’s online version of most volumes.

This makes Google Books a wonderful tool—a transformative one, in the eyes of the court, and thus non-infringing—but it also means that the service has ended up being more tantalizing than fulfilling. What Google has created is less a universal library than a tinted window into one.

It was not always going to be this way. A proposed 2011 settlement between Google and its antagonists would have laid the groundwork for paid access to all of the scanned books. Yet many book lovers viewed such a settlement (rightly, in my opinion) as creating an undesirable, near-monopolistic online book outlet. The judge presiding over the case, Denny Chin, agreed and rejected it, ruling for the Southern District of New York that Google Books, as is, was a fair use. The Second Circuit has unanimously concurred.

It’s now a good time to think about more heterogeneous models and markets for ebooks, including in the discussion not only the Googles and Amazons of the world, but also libraries, which find existing channels and platforms for ebooks less than ideal.

This matches larger trends in digital librarianship. As Google has shifted its attention away from books, nonprofits have stepped in to ensure access to our shared culture. The Digital Public Library of America, which I direct, brings together the digitized contents of America’s libraries, archives, and museums. HathiTrust—which was also unsuccessfully sued by the Author Guild—was established by universities to preserve digital copies of their holdings for the long term. The Internet Archive also has scanning centers in multiple locations, and many smaller institutions have started their own digitization programs.

For those organizations to provide greater access to digitized print books, the United States will have to solve thorny issues about the status of much of what is held in its cultural-heritage institutions. Works from before 1923 are in the public domain, and recent volumes are clearly under copyright. But a large percentage of books between the distant and recent past are in a grey territory where their status is foggy. Their copyright may not have been renewed, and their publishers and authors are long gone. With imperfect records we can’t be sure what we can do with these millions of books.