Google Books Project

Google Books is a giant catalog millions of books on almost any topic. Google intends to scan every books ever published, and to make full texts searchable, in the same way that web sites can be searched on the company’s search engine at google.com.

Google provides full access to public domain books (or those for which permission has been obtained from the publisher).

For copyrighted books there is limited ability to search by keyword and view a limited number of pages. The Google Books Project does not put entire books online for free. If a book still protected by copyright, the user’s search results will show only the brief section of the book that includes the world or phrase searched and the page number it appears on, along with details about the book.

The project started around 2003 when Google approached the Library of Congress with proposal to digitize all the books in the library. The Library of Congress offered a counterproposal that would only include public domain books, Google did not follow up.

In the December 2004 Google announcing that it partnerships with libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the New York Public Library to digitalize all or large portions of their print collections, which would cover more than 15 million volumes.

The number of partners continues to grow. The University of California, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Virginia and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid joined in 2006.

In collaboration with the participating libraries Google scans books in the public domain along with copyrighted books. The company also intends to scan out-of print books, which benefits individuals searching for books that might otherwise be difficult or impossible to find.
Google Books Project