Google Books

"Google Print" redirects here. Not to be confused with Google Cloud Print.
This article is about Google's book search engine. For Google's e-book service, see Google Play Books. For the children's book, see The Google Book.
Google Books
Screenshot
Type of site
Digital library
OwnerGoogle
URLbooks.google.com
LaunchedOctober 2004; 20 years ago (2004-10) (as Google Print)
Current statusActive

Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean)[1] is a service from Google 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.[2] Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project.[3] Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.[4][5]

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[6][7] and promoting the democratization of knowledge.[8] However, it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations,[8][9] and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.

As of October 2019, Google celebrated 15 years of Google Books and provided the number of scanned books as more than 40 million titles.[10] Google estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world,[11] and stated that it intended to scan all of them.[11] However, the scanning process in American academic libraries has slowed since the 2000s.[12][13] 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 works in the United States.[14] A 2023 study by scholars from the University of California, Berkeley and Northeastern University's business schools found that Google Books's digitization of books has led to increased sales for the physical versions of the books.[15]

  1. ^ Love, Dylan. "An Inside Look At One Of Google's Most Controversial Projects". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 21 October 2017. Retrieved 21 October 2017.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference book sources was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Mark O'Neill (28 January 2009). "Read Complete Magazines Online in Google Books". Make Use Of. Archived from the original on 2 April 2016. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
  4. ^ "About Magazines search". Google Books Help. Archived from the original on 14 May 2015. Retrieved 13 January 2015.
  5. ^ Bergquist, Kevin (2006-02-13). "Google project promotes public good". The University Record. University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 2007-10-12. Retrieved 2007-04-11.
  6. ^ Pace, Andrew K. (January 2006). "Is This the Renaissance or the Dark Ages?". American Libraries. American Library Association. Archived from the original on 2007-04-03. Retrieved 2007-04-11.
  7. ^ a b Malte Herwig, "Google's Total Library" Archived 2012-01-28 at the Wayback Machine, Spiegel Online International, March 28, 2007.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference LAWSUITS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ "15 years of Google Books". 17 October 2019. Archived from the original on 29 September 2020. Retrieved 20 October 2019.
  10. ^ a b Google: 129 Million Different Books Have Been Published Archived 2015-06-14 at the Wayback Machine PC World
  11. ^ Heyman, Stephen (28 October 2015). "Google Books: A Complex and Controversial Experiment". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 8 November 2020. Retrieved 21 February 2017.
  12. ^ "What Ever Happened to Google Books?". The New Yorker. 11 September 2015. Archived from the original on 12 April 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2020.
  13. ^ Cite error: The named reference atlantic was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  14. ^ Nagaraj, Abhishek; Reimers, Imke (2023). "Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project". American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. 15 (4): 428–458. doi:10.1257/pol.20210702. ISSN 1945-7731. S2CID 262153738.