The Story Behind Google Book Search

Google's ultimate goal with Google Book Search is to let you search the full text of any book ever published, and then provide the option of reading that book online (for selected books), purchasing the book (from selected booksellers), or finding out where you can borrow a copy of the book (from participating libraries). To achieve this goal, of course, Google must have the full text of all these books in its databasewhich is a formidable challenge.

Google is now in the process of adding the contents of as many books as possible to its Google Books database. This book content is coming primarily from two sourcespublishers and libraries.

Google Books Partner Program

Publishers can submit their books for inclusion in the Google Books database via the Google Books Partner Program. This program is being pushed as a way for publishers to promote their books online, via exposure to Google's vast user base.

When a publisher signs up for a Google Books account, the company sends Google a list of their books they want included in Google Book Search. Ideally, the publisher also sends Google a printed copy of each book or the text of each book in PDF format. (The publisher can also just have Google add them to the Google Books database when they're scanned at a librarywhich we'll get into in a moment.)

Just because Google has the full text of the book in its database, however, doesn't mean that users can read the entire book online, for free. To protect the publishers' copyrighted content, Google only lets readers view a handful of pages online; in addition, all copy, save, and print functions are disabled, so freeloading readers can't download or print books for free. The only reason that Google archives the full text of the book is so readers can search the entire book, and then read short snippets of matching text.

In other words, Google Book Search is not intended as a way for readers to read entire books online. Instead, you use Google Book Search to discover what books contain the information you're looking for; you can then opt to purchase the book or borrow it from a library.

Google Books Library Project

The other way that Google is obtaining content for its Google Books database is from participating libraries, as part of the Google Books Library Project. To date, Google has agreements with four academic libraries (Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Michigan) and with the New York Public Library to scan the books in their collections, and to make those books available for searching online. The result is like having all the books from these libraries available in your web browser, with Google Book Search serving as a kind of online card catalog to all that book content.

Of course, the library doesn't own the content of all the books in its collection. While Google may be able to scan a library's books, it can't legally distribute those books (or provide access to those books electronically) unless the books' publishers have given Google permission to do so. Unless, that is, a given book is old enough so that its copyright has expired.

So the library collections available through Google Book Search contain searchable indexes of all available texts, and full-text versions of works in the public domain. It's not quite the same as having the full content of a library available for reading online, but it's getting close.