Any researcher or student, whether living in New York or New Delhi, can now research and learn from these books that previously were only available in a library.
Google Inc.’s Internet-leading search engine will begin offering entire contents of ‘public domain‘ material, i.e. books and government documents that are not entangled in a copyright battle over how much material can be scanned and indexed from five major libraries. Among the works indexed thus far are the works of Shakespeare and countless government documents.
Sidestepping lawsuits by the US publishing industry that seek to derail a related effort by Google to scan copyrighted books, the company and its library partners said they would put up their first large collection of public domain works.
Today, we welcome the world to our library, Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan said in a statement. As educators, we are inspired by the possibility of sharing these important works with people around the globe.
The list of Google’s so-called "public domain" works — volumes no longer protected by copyright — include Henry James novels, Civil War histories, Congressional acts and biographies of wealthy New Yorkers.
The books were scanned by the Mountain View, California-based company’s book digitization project and can be read in their entirety at http://print.google.com/. The text is searchable and users can save images of individual pages.
The program is designed and intended to make more library material available through a few clicks. Google reportedly plans to create digital versions of millions of books stacked in the New York Public Library and the university libraries at Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford.
Google said that the material, available at: http://www.print.google.com, represents the first large batch of public domain works to be indexed in its search engine since the company announced it’s ambitious library-scanning project late last year.
Google has declined to disclose how many books have been scanned from the libraries so far. The project is expected to require years to complete.
Small Beginning
The works are just a small fraction of the information that the Google Print project plans to eventually make available. These older books are the ones most inaccessible to users, and make up the vast majority of books–a conservative estimate would be 80%. Google said in a statement posted on the company’s Web site.
Earlier, Google said it would soon resume scanning of in-copyright works with library partners as it seeks to create an electronic card catalogue of books for Google Print.
The initial focus, it said, was on public domain books, orphaned works and out-of-print titles as it seeks to downplay the controversy over scanning copyrighted works that are the subject of two US lawsuits filed by publishers and authors.
The Google Print program was unveiled a year ago involving the four great US libraries plus Oxford University to help users search the world’s great books and to help authors and publishers promote their books in order to expand their sales.
However a bitter copyright dispute is threatening to crimp Google’s plans. The Authors Guild and five major publishers are reportedly suing to prevent Google from scanning copyrighted material in the libraries without explicit permission.
We think that making books easier to find will be good for authors, publishers, and our users, it said.