Google Books Hopes to "Digitize Every Book Ever Printed"

One of the most popular search engines, Google, began a project now known as Google Books, in 2004. The ambitious project is a service from Google that searches for the full text of books - that were scanned by Google - and converts those scans using optical character recognition and stores them in its digital database. So far Google has scanned 12 million books and has made them available on the internet; however, Google's goal is to scan up to 40 million titles. Director of Google Books, Daniel Clancy, believes that it is Google's mission to organize all the world's information by scanning every book every printed and making them available online.

According to Michael Keller, who is a Google Books supporter and a librarian at Stanford University, Google Books is a valuable program. "The indexing of every word in every one of the books would allow us to get more out of the books. Another goal was to make more accessible the contents of these libraries to others around the United States and indeed around the world."

Although Google Books has many supporters, including the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University, there are many universities and scholars who do not support the project.

Gary Reback, an attorney from Silicon Valley, CA who represents the Open Book Alliance - which includes members such as Microsoft and Amazon - predicts that Google will begin this project without charging for what it digitizes, but will eventually impose hefty fees. "What Google is proposing here is not like any library you have ever been to. It's not a public library. It's a private library. And it's being run for profit, big profits. Google is going to charge university scholars, ordinary people, even schoolchildren, to get access to books that Google copied without the permission of the publisher or the author."

Selling digital copies of books could be quite profitable, however Google insists its plans and its investment, which it won't disclose, are not based on profits.

Read or listen to the story online at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec09/google_12-30.html.