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Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database.The basic Google book link is found at: https://books.google.com/ . The "advanced" interface allowing more specific searches is found at: https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives. The Publisher Program was first known as Google Print when it was introduced at the
Frankfurt Book Fair The Frankfurt Book Fair (German: Frankfurter Buchmesse, FBM) is the world's largest trade fair for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for internationa ...
in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital inventory, was announced in December 2004. The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge.Malte Herwig, "Google's Total Library"
, ''Spiegel Online International'', March 28, 2007.
However, it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process. , Google celebrated 15 years of Google Books and provided the number of scanned books as more than 40 million titles. Google estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world,
PC World
and stated that it intended to scan all of them. However, the scanning process in American academic libraries has slowed in recent years. Google Book's scanning efforts have been subject to litigation, including '' Authors Guild v. Google'', a class-action lawsuit in the United States, decided in Google's favor (see below). This was a major case that came close to changing copyright practices for
orphan work An orphan work is a copyright-protected work for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable. Sometimes the names of the originators or rightsholders are known, yet it is impossible to contact them because additional details ...
s in the United States.


Details

Results from Google Books show up in both the universal Google Search and in the dedicated Google Books search website (''books.google.com''). In response to search queries, Google Books allows users to view full pages from books in which the search terms appear if the book is out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. If Google believes the book is still under copyright, a user sees "snippets" of text around the queried search terms. All instances of the search terms in the book text appear with a yellow highlight. The four access levels used on Google Books are: * Full view: Books in the public domain are available for "full view" and can be downloaded for free. In-print books acquired through the Partner Program are also available for full view if the publisher has given permission, although this is rare. * Preview: For in-print books where permission has been granted, the number of viewable pages is limited to a "preview" set by a variety of access restrictions and security measures, some based on user-tracking. Usually, the publisher can set the percentage of the book available for preview. Users are restricted from copying, downloading or printing book previews. A watermark reading "Copyrighted material" appears at the bottom of pages. All books acquired through the Partner Program are available for preview. * Snippet view: A "snippet view" – two to three lines of text surrounding the queried search term – is displayed in cases where Google does not have permission of the copyright owner to display a preview. This could be because Google cannot identify the owner or the owner declined permission. If a search term appears many times in a book, Google displays no more than three snippets, thus preventing the user from viewing too much of the book. Also, Google does not display any snippets for certain reference books, such as dictionaries, where the display of even snippets can harm the market for the work. Google maintains that no permission is required under copyright law to display the snippet view. * No preview: Google also displays search results for books that have not been digitized. As these books have not been scanned, their text is not searchable and only the metadata such as the title, author, publisher, number of pages, ISBN, subject and copyright information, and in some cases, a table of contents and book summary is available. In effect, this is similar to an online library card catalog. In response to criticism from groups such as the American Association of Publishers and the Authors Guild, Google announced an
opt-out The term opt-out refers to several methods by which individuals can avoid receiving unsolicited product or service information. This option is usually associated with direct marketing campaigns such as e-mail marketing or direct mail. A list of thos ...
policy in August 2005, through which copyright owners could provide a list of titles that they do not want scanned, and the request would be respected. The company also stated that it would not scan any in-copyright books between August and 1 November 2005, to provide the owners with the opportunity to decide which books to exclude from the Project. Thus, copyright owners have three choices with respect to any work: # It can participate in the Partner Program to make a book available for preview or full view, in which case it would share revenue derived from the display of pages from the work in response to user queries. # It can let Google scan the book under the Library Project and display snippets in response to user queries. # It can opt out of the Library Project, in which case Google will not scan the book. If the book has already been scanned, Google will reset its access level as 'No preview'. Most scanned works are no longer in print or commercially available. In addition to procuring books from libraries, Google also obtains books from its publisher partners, through the "Partner Program" – designed to help publishers and authors promote their books. Publishers and authors submit either a digital copy of their book in EPUB or PDF format, or a print copy to Google, which is made available on Google Books for preview. The publisher can control the percentage of the book available for preview, with the minimum being 20%. They can also choose to make the book fully viewable, and even allow users to download a PDF copy. Books can also be made available for sale on Google Play. Unlike the Library Project, this does not raise any copyright concerns as it is conducted pursuant to an agreement with the publisher. The publisher can choose to withdraw from the agreement at any time. For many books, Google Books displays the original page numbers. However,
Tim Parks Timothy Harold Parks (born 19 December 1954) is a British novelist, translator, author and professor of literature. Career He is the author of eighteen novels (notably ''Europa'', which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997). His first ...
, writing in ''The New York Review of Books'' in 2014, noted that Google had stopped providing page numbers for many recent publications (likely the ones acquired through the Partner Program) "presumably in alliance with the publishers, in order to force those of us who need to prepare footnotes to buy paper editions."


Scanning of books

The project began in 2002 under the codename Project Ocean. Google co-founder
Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
had always had an interest in digitizing books. When he and
Marissa Mayer Marissa Ann Mayer (; born May 30, 1975) is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contacts. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a p ...
began experimenting with
book scanning Book scanning or book digitization (also: magazine scanning or magazine digitization) is the process of converting physical books and magazines into digital media such as images, electronic text, or electronic books (e-books) by using an imag ...
in 2002, it took 40 minutes for them to digitize a 300-page book. But soon after the technology had been developed to the extent that scanning operators could scan up to 6000 pages an hour. Google established designated scanning centers to which books were transported by trucks. The stations could digitize at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The books were placed in a custom-built mechanical cradle that adjusted the book spine in place while an array of lights and optical instruments scanned the two open pages. Each page would have two cameras directed at it capturing the image, while a range finder LIDAR overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book's surface to capture the curvature of the paper. A human operator would turn the pages by hand, using a foot pedal to take the photographs. With no need to flatten the pages or align them perfectly, Google's system not only reached a remarkable efficiency and speed but also helped protect the fragile collections from being over-handled. Afterwards, the crude images went through three levels of processing: first, de-warping algorithms used the LIDAR data fix the pages' curvature. Then, optical character recognition (OCR) software transformed the raw images into text, and, lastly, another round of algorithms extracted page numbers, footnotes, illustrations and diagrams. Many of the books are scanned using a customized
Elphel Elphel, Inc. designs and manufactures open hardware and free software cameras. The company was founded in 2001 by Russian physicist Andrey Filippov, who emigrated to the US in 1995. Elphel cameras have been used to capture images for Google St ...
323 camera at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A patent awarded to Google in 2009 revealed that Google had come up with an innovative system for scanning books that uses two cameras and infrared light to automatically correct for the curvature of pages in a book. By constructing a 3D model of each page and then "de-warping" it, Google is able to present flat-looking pages without having to really make the pages flat, which requires the use of destructive methods such as unbinding or glass plates to individually flatten each page, which is inefficient for large scale scanning. Google decided to omit color information in favour of better spatial resolution, as most out-of-copyright books at the time did not contain colors. Each page image was passed through algorithms that distinguished the text and illustration regions. Text regions were then processed via OCR to enable full-text searching. Google expended considerable resources in coming up with optimal compression techniques, aiming for high image quality while keeping the file sizes minimal to enable access by internet users with low bandwidth.


Website functionality

For each work, Google Books automatically generates an overview page. This page displays information extracted from the book—its publishing details, a high frequency word map, the table of contents—as well as secondary material, such as summaries, reader reviews, and links to other relevant texts. A visitor to the page, for instance, might see a list of books that share a similar genre and theme, or they might see a list of current scholarship on the book. This content, moreover, offers interactive possibilities for users signed into their Google account. They can export the bibliographic data and citations in standard formats, write their own reviews, add it their library to be tagged, organized, and shared with other people. Thus, Google Books collects these more interpretive elements from a range of sources, including the users, third-party sites like Goodreads, and often the book's author and publisher. In fact, to encourage authors to upload their own books, Google has added several functionalities to the website. The authors can allow visitors to download their ebook for free, or they can set their own purchase price. They can change the price back and forth, offering discounts whenever it suits them. Also, if a book's author chooses to add an ISBN, LCCN or OCLC record number, the service will update the book's url to include it. Then, the author can set a specific page as the link's anchor. This option makes their book more easily discoverable.


Ngram Viewer

The Ngram Viewer is a service connected to Google Books that graphs the frequency of word usage across their book collection. The service is important for historians and linguists as it can provide an inside look into human culture through word use throughout time periods. This program has fallen under criticism because of errors in the metadata used in the program.


Content issues and criticism

The project has received criticism that its stated aim of preserving orphaned and out-of-print works is at risk due to scanned data having errors and such problems not being solved. Users can report errors in Google scanned books at
support.google.com/books/partner/troubleshooter/2983879
'.


Scanning errors

The scanning process is subject to errors. For example, some pages may be unreadable, upside down, or in the wrong order. Scholars have even reported crumpled pages, obscuring thumbs and fingers, and smeared or blurry images. On this issue, a declaration from Google at the end of scanned books says: As of 2009, Google stated that they would start using
reCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system that enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The original version asked users to decipher hard to read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users to decipher text or ...
to help fix the errors found in Google Book scans. This method would only improve scanned words that are hard to recognize because of the scanning process and cannot solve errors such as turned pages or blocked words. Scanning errors have inspired works of art such as published collections of anomalous pages and a Tumblr blog.


Errors in metadata

Scholars have frequently reported rampant errors in the metadata information on Google Books – including misattributed authors and erroneous dates of publication.
Geoffrey Nunberg Geoffrey Nunberg (June 1, 1945– August 11, 2020) was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001 he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to Natio ...
, a linguist researching on the changes in word usage over time noticed that a search for books published before 1950 and containing the word "internet" turned up an unlikely 527 results. Woody Allen is mentioned in 325 books ostensibly published before he was born. Google responded to Nunberg by blaming the bulk of errors on the outside contractors. Other metadata errors reported include publication dates before the author's birth (e.g. 182 works by Charles Dickens prior to his birth in 1812); incorrect subject classifications (an edition of ''Moby Dick'' found under "computers", a biography of Mae West classified under "religion"), conflicting classifications (10 editions of Whitman's ''Leaves of Grass'' all classified as both "fiction" and "nonfiction"), incorrectly spelled titles, authors, and publishers (''Moby Dick: or the White "Wall"''), and metadata for one book incorrectly appended to a completely different book (the metadata for an 1818 mathematical work leads to a 1963 romance novel). Metadata errors based on incorrect scanned dates makes research using the Google Books Project database difficult. Google has shown only limited interest in cleaning up these errors.


Language issues

Some European politicians and intellectuals have criticized Google's effort on
linguistic imperialism Linguistic imperialism or language imperialism is occasionally defined as "the transfer of a dominant language to other people". This language "transfer" (or rather unilateral imposition) comes about because of imperialism. The transfer is consid ...
grounds. They argue that because the vast majority of books proposed to be scanned are in English, it will result in disproportionate representation of natural languages in the digital world. German, Russian, French, and Spanish, for instance, are popular languages in scholarship. The disproportionate online emphasis on English, however, could shape access to historical scholarship, and, ultimately, the growth and direction of future scholarship. Among these critics is
Jean-Noël Jeanneney Jean-Noël Jeanneney (born 2 April 1942, in Grenoble) is a French historian and politician. He is the son of Jean-Marcel Jeanneney and the grandson of Jules Jeanneney, both important figures in French politics. Education After his secondary scho ...
, the former president of the '' Bibliothèque nationale de France''.


Google Books versus Google Scholar

While Google Books has digitized large numbers of journal back issues, its scans do not include the metadata required for identifying specific articles in specific issues. This has led the makers of Google Scholar to start their own program to digitize and host older journal articles (in agreement with their publishers).


Library partners

The Google Books Library Project is aimed at scanning and making searchable the collections of several major research
libraries A library is a collection of Document, materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or electronic media, digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a ...
. Along with
bibliographic Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ...
information, snippets of text from a book are often viewable. If a book is out of copyright and in the public domain, the book is fully available to read or
download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote ...
. In-copyright books scanned through the Library Project are made available on Google Books for snippet view. Regarding the quality of scans, Google acknowledges that they are "not always of sufficiently high quality" to be offered for sale on Google Play. Also, because of supposed technical constraints, Google does not replace scans with higher quality versions that may be provided by the publishers. The project is the subject of the '' Authors Guild v. Google'' lawsuit, filed in 2005 and ruled in favor of Google in 2013, and again, on appeal, in 2015. Copyright owners can claim the rights for a scanned book and make it available for preview or full view (by "transferring" it to their Partner Program account), or request Google to prevent the book text from being searched. The number of institutions participating in the Library Project has grown since its inception.


Initial partners

*
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
,
Harvard University Library Harvard Library is the umbrella organization for Harvard University's libraries and services. It is the oldest library system in the United States and both the largest academic library and largest private library in the world. Its collection ...
*: The Harvard University Library and Google conducted a pilot throughout 2005. The project continued, with the aim of increasing online access to the holdings of the Harvard University Library, which includes more than 15.8 million volumes. While physical access to Harvard's library materials is generally restricted to current Harvard students, faculty, and researchers, or to scholars who can come to Cambridge, the Harvard-Google Project has been designed to enable both members of the Harvard community and users everywhere to discover works in the Harvard collection. *
University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
,
University of Michigan Library The University of Michigan Library is the academic library system of the University of Michigan. The university's 38 constituent and affiliated libraries together make it the List of largest libraries in the United States#Largest research libraries ...
*: As of March 2012, 5.5 million volumes were scanned. * New York Public Library *: In this pilot program, NYPL is working with Google to offer a collection of its public domain books, which will be scanned in their entirety and made available for free to the public online. Users will be able to search and browse the full text of these works. When the scanning process is complete, the books may be accessed from both The New York Public Library's website and from the Google search engine. *
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
, Bodleian Library * Stanford University, Stanford University Libraries ( SULAIR)


Additional partners

Other institutional partners have joined the project since the partnership was first announced: *
Austrian National Library The Austrian National Library (german: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) is the largest library in Austria, with more than 12 million items in its various collections. The library is located in the Neue Burg Wing of the Hofburg in center of V ...
*
Bavarian State Library The Bavarian State Library (german: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, abbreviated BSB, called ''Bibliotheca Regia Monacensis'' before 1919) in Munich is the central " Landesbibliothek", i. e. the state library of the Free State of Bavaria, the big ...
* Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon *
Big Ten Academic Alliance The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), is the academic consortium of the universities in the Big Ten Conference. The consortium was renamed on June 29, 2016. Member universities The Bi ...
*
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, Columbia University Library System * Complutense University of Madrid *
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
, Cornell University Library *
Ghent University Ghent University ( nl, Universiteit Gent, abbreviated as UGent) is a public research university located in Ghent, Belgium. Established before the state of Belgium itself, the university was founded by the Dutch King William I in 1817, when th ...
, Ghent University Library/
Boekentoren The Boekentoren (Dutch for ''Book Tower'') is a famous building located in Ghent, Belgium, designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. It is part of the Ghent University Library and currently houses 3 million books. The Boekentoren is di ...
* Keio University, Keio Media Centers (Libraries) *
National Library of Catalonia The Library of Catalonia ( ca, Biblioteca de Catalunya, ) is the Catalan national library, located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The primary mission of the Library of Catalonia is to collect, preserve, and spread Catalan bibliographic producti ...
, ''
Biblioteca de Catalunya The Library of Catalonia ( ca, Biblioteca de Catalunya, ) is the Catalan national library, located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. The primary mission of the Library of Catalonia is to collect, preserve, and spread Catalan bibliographic producti ...
'' *
Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
,
Princeton University Library Princeton University Library is the main library system of Princeton University. With holdings of more than 7 million books, 6 million microforms, and 48,000 linear feet of manuscripts, it is among the largest libraries in the world by number of ...
* University of California,
California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...
* University of Lausanne, Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne *
University of Mysore The University of Mysore is a public state university in Mysore, Karnataka, India. The university was founded during the reign of Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, the Maharaja of Mysore. The university is recognised by the University Grants Commission ...
, Mysore University Library *: The partnership was for digitizing 800,000 texts, including manuscripts written in palm leaves dating back to 8th century. * University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Libraries *:The partnership was for digitizing the library's Latin American collection – about half a million volumes. * University of Virginia,
University of Virginia Library The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective adm ...
*
University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...
, University of Wisconsin Libraries *:As of March 2012, about 600,000 volumes had been scanned.


History

2002: A group of team members at Google officially launch the "secret 'books' project." Google founders
Sergey Brin Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (russian: link=no, Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur, who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was th ...
and
Larry Page Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin. Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 unti ...
came up with the idea that later became Google Books while still graduate students at Stanford in 1996. The history page on the Google Books website describes their initial vision for this project: "in a future world in which vast collections of books are digitized, people would use a ' web crawler' to index the books' content and analyze the connections between them, determining any given book's relevance and usefulness by tracking the number and quality of citations from other books." This team visited the sites of some of the larger digitization efforts at that time including the Library of Congress's American Memory Project, Project Gutenberg, and the Universal Library to find out how they work, as well as the University of Michigan, Page's alma mater, and the base for such digitization projects as JSTOR and Making of America. In a conversation with the at that time University President Mary Sue Coleman, when Page found out that the university's current estimate for scanning all the library's volumes was 1,000 years, Page reportedly told Coleman that he "believes Google can help make it happen in six." 2003: The team works to develop a high-speed scanning process as well as software for resolving issues in odd type sizes, unusual fonts, and "other unexpected peculiarities." December 2004: Google signaled an extension to its Google Print initiative known as the Google Print Library Project.O'Sullivan, Joseph and Adam Smith
"All booked up,"
''Googleblog.'' December 14, 2004.
Google announced partnerships with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the
University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
, Harvard (
Harvard University Library Harvard Library is the umbrella organization for Harvard University's libraries and services. It is the oldest library system in the United States and both the largest academic library and largest private library in the world. Its collection ...
), Stanford ( Green Library), Oxford ( Bodleian Library), and the New York Public Library. According to press releases and university librarians, Google planned to digitize and make available through its Google Books service approximately 15 million volumes within a decade. The announcement soon triggered controversy, as publisher and author associations challenged Google's plans to digitize, not just books in the public domain, but also titles still under copyright. September–October 2005: Two lawsuits against Google charge that the company has not respected copyrights and has failed to properly compensate authors and publishers. One is a class action suit on behalf of authors (Authors Guild v. Google, September 20, 2005) and the other is a civil lawsuit brought by five large publishers and the
Association of American Publishers The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP lobbies for book, journal, and education publishers in the United States. AAP members include most of the major commercia ...
. ( McGraw Hill v. Google, October 19, 2005) Copyright infringement suits against Google and their settlement: November 2005: Google changed the name of this service from Google Print to Google Book Search. Its program enabling publishers and authors to include their books in the service was renamed Google Books Partner Program, and the partnership with libraries became
Google Books Library Project Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
. 2006: Google added a "download a pdf" button to all its out-of-copyright, public domain books. It also added a new browsing interface along with new "About this Book" pages. August 2006: The University of California System announced that it would join the Books digitization project. This includes a portion of the 34 million volumes within the approximately 100 libraries managed by the System. September 2006: The Complutense University of Madrid became the first Spanish-language library to join the Google Books Library Project. October 2006: The
University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...
announced that it would join the Book Search digitization project along with the Wisconsin Historical Society Library. Combined, the libraries have 7.2 million holdings. November 2006: The University of Virginia joined the project. Its libraries contain more than five million volumes and more than 17 million manuscripts, rare books and archives. January 2007: The University of Texas at Austin announced that it would join the Book Search digitization project. At least one million volumes would be digitized from the university's 13 library locations. March 2007: The
Bavarian State Library The Bavarian State Library (german: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, abbreviated BSB, called ''Bibliotheca Regia Monacensis'' before 1919) in Munich is the central " Landesbibliothek", i. e. the state library of the Free State of Bavaria, the big ...
announced a partnership with Google to scan more than a million public domain and out-of-print works in German as well as English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. May 2007: A book digitizing project partnership was announced jointly by Google and the Cantonal and University Library of Lausanne. May 2007: The
Boekentoren The Boekentoren (Dutch for ''Book Tower'') is a famous building located in Ghent, Belgium, designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. It is part of the Ghent University Library and currently houses 3 million books. The Boekentoren is di ...
Library of
Ghent University Ghent University ( nl, Universiteit Gent, abbreviated as UGent) is a public research university located in Ghent, Belgium. Established before the state of Belgium itself, the university was founded by the Dutch King William I in 1817, when th ...
announced that it would participate with Google in digitizing and making digitized versions of 19th century books in the French and Dutch languages available online. May 2007: Mysore University announces Google will digitize over 800,000 books and manuscripts–including around 100,000 manuscripts written in Sanskrit or Kannada on both paper and palm leaves. June 2007: The
Committee on Institutional Cooperation The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), is the academic consortium of the universities in the Big Ten Conference. The consortium was renamed on June 29, 2016. Member universities The Bi ...
(rebranded as the
Big Ten Academic Alliance The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), is the academic consortium of the universities in the Big Ten Conference. The consortium was renamed on June 29, 2016. Member universities The Bi ...
in 2016) announced that its twelve member libraries would participate in scanning 10 million books over the course of the next six years. July 2007: Keio University became Google's first library partner in Japan with the announcement that they would digitize at least 120,000 public domain books. August 2007: Google announced that it would digitize up to 500,000 both copyrighted and public domain items from Cornell University Library. Google would also provide a digital copy of all works scanned to be incorporated into the university's own library system. September 2007: Google added a feature that allows users to share snippets of books that are in the public domain. The snippets may appear exactly as they do in the scan of the book, or as plain text. September 2007: Google debuted a new feature called "My Library" which allows users to create personal customized libraries, selections of books that they can label, review, rate, or full-text search. December 2007:
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
was added as a partner in digitizing public domain works. May 2008: Microsoft tapered off and planned to end its scanning project, which had reached 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles. October 2008: A settlement was reached between the publishing industry and Google after two years of negotiation. Google agreed to compensate authors and publishers in exchange for the right to make millions of books available to the public. October 2008: The HathiTrust "Shared Digital Repository" (later known as the HathiTrust Digital Library) is launched jointly by the
Committee on Institutional Cooperation The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), is the academic consortium of the universities in the Big Ten Conference. The consortium was renamed on June 29, 2016. Member universities The Bi ...
and the 11 university libraries in the University of California system, all of which were Google partner libraries, in order to archive and provide academic access to books from their collections scanned by Google and others. November 2008: Google reached the 7 million book mark for items scanned by Google and by their publishing partners. 1 million were in full preview mode and 1 million were fully viewable and downloadable public domain works. About five million were out of print. December 2008: Google announced the inclusion of magazines in Google Books. Titles include '' New York Magazine'', ''
Ebony Ebony is a dense black/brown hardwood, coming from several species in the genus '' Diospyros'', which also contains the persimmons. Unlike most woods, ebony is dense enough to sink in water. It is finely textured and has a mirror finish when ...
'', and '' Popular Mechanics'' February 2009: Google launched a mobile version of Google Book Search, allowing iPhone and Android phone users to read over 1.5 million public domain works in the US (and over 500,000 outside the US) using a mobile browser. Instead of page images, the plain text of the book is displayed. May 2009: At the annual BookExpo convention in New York, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. December 2009: A French court shut down the scanning of copyrighted books published in France, saying this violated copyright laws. It was the first major legal loss for the scanning project. April 2010: Visual artists were not included in the previous lawsuit and settlement, are the plaintiff groups in another lawsuit, and say they intend to bring more than just Google Books under scrutiny. "The new class action," read the statement, "goes beyond Google's Library Project, and includes Google's other systematic and pervasive infringements of the rights of photographers, illustrators and other visual artists." May 2010: It was reported that Google would launch a digital book store called Google Editions. It would compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other electronic book retailers with its own e-book store. Unlike others, Google Editions would be completely online and would not require a specific device (such as kindle, Nook, or iPad). June 2010: Google passed 12 million books scanned. August 2010: It was announced that Google intends to scan all known existing 129,864,880 books within a decade, amounting to over 4 billion digital pages and 2 trillion words in total. December 2010: Google eBooks (Google Editions) was launched in the US. December 2010: Google launched the Ngram Viewer, which collects and graphs data on word usage across its book collection. March 2011: A federal judge rejected the settlement reached between the publishing industry and Google. March 2012: Google passed 20 million books scanned.Howard, Jennife
''Google Begins to Scale Back Its Scanning of Books From University Libraries''
, March 9, 2012
March 2012: Google reached a settlement with publishers. January 2013: The documentary '' Google and the World Brain'' was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. November 2013: Ruling in '' Authors Guild v. Google'', US District Judge
Denny Chin Denny Chin (陳卓光; born April 13, 1954) is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York City. He was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court f ...
sides with Google, citing fair use. The authors said they would appeal. October 2015: The appeals court sided with Google, declaring that Google did not violate copyright law. According to the New York Times, Google has scanned more than 25 million books. April 2016: The US Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild's appeal, which means the lower court's decision stood, and Google would be allowed to scan library books and display snippets in search results without violating the law.


Status

Google has been quite secretive regarding its plans on the future of the Google Books project. Scanning operations had been slowing down since at least 2012, as confirmed by the librarians at several of Google's partner institutions. At University of Wisconsin, the speed had reduced to less than half of what it was in 2006. However, the librarians have said that the dwindling pace could be a natural result of maturation of the project – initially stacks of books were entirely taken up for scanning whereas now only the titles that had not already been scanned needed to be considered. The company's own Google Books timeline page did not mention anything after 2007 even in 2017, and the Google Books blog was merged into the Google Search blog in 2012. Despite winning the decade-long litigation in 2017, '' The Atlantic'' has said that Google has "all but shut down its scanning operation." In April 2017, ''
Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...
'' reported that there were only a few Google employees working on the project, and new books were still being scanned, but at a significantly lower rate. It commented that the decade-long legal battle had caused Google to lose its ambition.


Legal issues

Through the project, library books were being digitized somewhat indiscriminately regardless of copyright status, which led to a number of lawsuits against Google. By the end of 2008, Google had reportedly digitized over seven million books, of which only about one million were works in the public domain. Of the rest, one million were in copyright and in print, and five million were in copyright but out of print. In 2005, a group of authors and publishers brought a major class-action lawsuit against Google for infringement on the copyrighted works. Google argued that it was preserving "orphaned works" – books still under copyright, but whose copyright holders could not be located. The Authors Guild and
Association of American Publishers The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP lobbies for book, journal, and education publishers in the United States. AAP members include most of the major commercia ...
separately sued Google in 2005 for its book project, citing "massive copyright infringement." Google countered that its project represented a
fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
and is the digital age equivalent of a
card catalog A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also c ...
with every word in the publication indexed. The lawsuits were consolidated, and eventually a settlement was proposed. The settlement received significant criticism on a wide variety of grounds, including antitrust, privacy, and inadequacy of the proposed classes of authors and publishers. The settlement was eventually rejected, and the publishers settled with Google soon after. The Authors Guild continued its case, and in 2011 their proposed class was certified. Google appealed that decision, with a number of amici asserting the inadequacy of the class, and the Second Circuit rejected the class certification in July 2013, remanding the case to the District Court for consideration of Google's
fair use Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests ...
defense. In 2015 Authors Guild filed another appeal against Google to be considered by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Google won the case unanimously based on the argument that they were not showing people the full texts but instead snippets, and they are not allowing people to illegally read the book. In a report, courts stated that they did not infringe on copyright laws, as they were protected under the fair use clause. Authors Guild tried again in 2016 to appeal the decision and this time took their case to be considered by the Supreme Court. The case was rejected, leaving the Second Circuit's decision on the case intact, meaning that Google did not violate copyright laws. This case also set a precedent for other similar cases in regards to fair use laws, as it further clarified the law and expanded it. Such clarification affects other scanning projects similar to Google. Other lawsuits followed the Authors Guild's lead. In 2006 a German lawsuit, previously filed, was withdrawn. In June 2006, Hervé de la Martinière, a French publisher known as La Martinière and
Éditions du Seuil Éditions du Seuil (), also known as ''Le Seuil'', is a French publishing house established in 1935 by Catholic intellectual Jean Plaquevent (1901–1965), and currently owned by La Martinière Groupe. It owes its name to this goal "The ''seuil' ...
, announced its intention to sue Google France. In 2009, the Paris Civil Court awarded 300,000 EUR (approximately 430,000
USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...
) in damages and interest and ordered Google to pay 10,000 EUR a day until it removes the publisher's books from its database. The court wrote, "Google violated author copyright laws by fully reproducing and making accessible" books that Seuil owns without its permission and that Google "committed acts of breach of copyright, which are of harm to the publishers". Google said it will appeal. Syndicat National de l'Edition, which joined the lawsuit, said Google has scanned about 100,000 French works under copyright. In December 2009, Chinese author Mian Mian filed a civil lawsuit for $8,900 against Google for scanning her novel, ''Acid Lovers''. This is the first such lawsuit to be filed against Google in China. Also, in November that year, the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) accused Google of scanning 18,000 books by 570 Chinese writers without authorization. Google agreed on Nov 20 to provide a list of Chinese books it had scanned, but the company refused to admit having "infringed" copyright laws. In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google of violating copyright law with their book search service. Rubin specifically criticized Google's policy of freely copying any work until notified by the copyright holder to stop. Google licensing of public domain works is also an area of concern due to using of
digital watermarking A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal. "Watermarking" is the process of hiding digital in ...
techniques with the books. Some published works that are in the public domain, such as all works created by the U.S. Federal government, are still treated like other works under copyright, and therefore locked after 1922.


Similar projects

* Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. , Project Gutenberg reached 50,000 items in its collection. *
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
is a non-profit which digitizes over 1000 books a day, as well as mirrors books from Google Books and other sources. , it hosted over 2.8 million public domain books, greater than the approximate 1 million public domain books at Google Books.
Open Library Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, ...
, a sister project of Internet Archive, lends 80,000 scanned and purchased commercial ebooks to the visitors of 150 libraries. * HathiTrust maintains HathiTrust Digital Library since October 13, 2008, which preserves and provides access to material scanned by Google, some of the Internet Archive books, and some scanned locally by partner institutions. , it includes about 6 million volumes, over 1 million of which are public domain (at least in the US). *
ACLS Humanities E-Book
an online collection of over 5,400 books of high quality in the humanities and related social sciences, accessible through institutional subscription. * Microsoft funded the scanning of 300,000 books to create Live Search Books in late 2006. It ran until May 2008, when the project was abandoned and the books were made freely available on the Internet Archive. * The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is a project under Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. The objective is to integrate several national and international digital libraries in one single web-portal. The NDLI provides free of cost access to many books in English and the Indian languages. *
Europeana Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought togethe ...
links to roughly 10 million digital objects , including video, photos, paintings, audio, maps, manuscripts, printed books, and newspapers from the past 2,000 years of European history from over 1,000 archives in the European Union. * Gallica from the French National Library links to about 4,000,000 digitized books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps and drawings, etc. Created in 1997, the digital library continues to expand at a rate of about 5000 new documents per month. Since the end of 2008, most of the new scanned documents are available in image and text formats. Most of these documents are written in French. * Wikisource * Runivers


See also

* A9.com,
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...
's book search * Book Rights Registry * Digital library * List of digital library projects * Universal library * National electronic library


References


Further reading

* *


External links

* *
About Google Books
* * * * * {{Authority control Computer-related introductions in 2004 Full-text scholarly online databases Books Books Scholarly search services