There is a course at the University of Northern Iowa called "The Anthropology of Zombies" this semester
That sounds better than a course offered by an English department but until there's one cross-listed between Criminal Justice and Medicine, it's all just talk!
I think you're underestimating the public good from what Google provides but even so, the universities get their own copy of the data for their books so they can do even more with it, as copyright allows.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
That's Janet! Miss Jackson if you're nasty.
InftyReader is a program that specializes in doing OCR on scientific documents and mathematical formulas. It saves documents in a variety of formats including LaTeX and MathML.
Two unfortunate things about it: 1) it's a Windows binary 2) it costs $900USD for 2 concurrent use licenses. It was free until they licensed a conventional OCR engine to better handle the text (its non-math recognition was pretty bad before).
The tricky part of the argument is this. It's not the publishers who are fighting this. They love expanding the e-book market. Indeed the publisher selling the e-book rights might never have bought the audio rights from the author.
According to a panelist recorded for The Command Line Podcast, publishers typically do buy the audio rights and a whole bunch of other rights from the author but usually don't to use them unless a work proves to be popular enough to justify the added expense to produce an audiobook edition.
However, I think the panelist is most familiar with a niche genre so what's typical in her experience may not be typical in others'.
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.