Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, OCRs, and stores in its digital database.
The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. When relevant to a user's keyword search, up to three results from the Google Book Search index are displayed above search results in the Google Web Search service (google.com).
A user may also search just for books
at the dedicated Google Book Search service.
Clicking a result from Google Book Search opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book as well as content-related advertisements and links to the publisher's website and booksellers.
Through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking, Google limits the number of viewable pages and attempts to prevent page printing and text copying of material under copyright.
The Google Book Search service remains in a beta stage but the underlying database continues to grow, with more than a hundred thousand titles added by publishers and authors and some 10,000 works in the public domain now indexed and included in search results.
Google Book Search allows public-domain works and other out-of-copyright material to be downloaded in PDF format. For users outside the United States, though, Google must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws. Says a member of the Google Book Search Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain."
Many of the books are scanned using Google's undisclosed proprietary method, most likely through the use of a robotic book scanner, where books are placed into the machine by a human operator and "scanned" (in practice, a digital camera is used at a distance) at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The rapidity of the scanning precludes checking the pages. Hence, some pages are not scanned or are scanned in such a fashion as to make them unreadable.
As of 2006, neither Google, nor rival Microsoft, would reveal how many books they have already scanned. Google did say that it is scanning more than 3,000 books per day, a rate that translates into more than 1 million annually .
The entire project may exceed $US 100 million dollars.
As of March 2007, the New York Times reported that Google has already digitized one million volumes at an estimated cost of US$5 million.
http://books.google.ie/
