Repository:Google Books

Repository Google Books
URL http://books.google.com


the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

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. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project.[1] 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 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. However, it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations,[2][3] 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, and stated that it intended to scan all of them.[4] 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. This was a major case that came close to changing copyright practices for orphan works in the United States.[5]

Google has digitized books from libraries and publishers, and has created a searchable catalog of many more titles. Some of the books are fully searchable (those in the public domain or with publisher permission), some have "snippet view" (searchable, but not fully viewable), and some just have publication information about the book. Search results also link places where hard copies of the book may be found.

Older books that are fully searchable can often be downloaded in full in pdf, or viewed in plain text (see the upper right corner of the screen while browsing book pages).

Here is a link to the advanced search window of Google.Books:
http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Google Books. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.