Google Print

Google Print is now live

Just do a search on the Google Print homepage. When they find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, it will be included in your search results. Click a book title and you'll see the page of the book that has your search terms, along with other information about the book and "Buy this Book" links to online bookstores (you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the title’s bibliographic data and brief snippets). You can also search for more information within that specific book and find nearby libraries that have it.

Once you've found a book you like:

• Search again: Find more results for your original search terms in other parts of the book, or try a new search within the book.
• Find reviews: Choose "About this Book," then click "Web search for reviews" to find online reviews of the book.
• Find related information: Choose "About this Book" and click on "Other web pages related to …" to find other websites that mention the book.
• Learn about the publisher: Click through to the publisher’s website to find more books from that publisher.
• Buy this book: Click on one of the online booksellers to go to directly to a page where you can buy the book.
• Find it in a Library: If this book is a library book, you'll be able to find a local library that has it by clicking "Find it in a Library" and entering your zip code.

Hat Tip to Susan Kuchinskas who wrote But the launch drew backlash from the Association of American University Presses, in the form of an open letter focusing on Google Library, a service that went live in December. In a May 20 letter, the AAUP raised the alarm about Google's library book-scanning initiative.

While many of the academic presses signed on enthusiastically for Google Print for Publishers, the letter said, no one mentioned Google Library. The subsequent statements by the search goliath have transformed AAUP members' initial confusion into "mounting alarm and concern at a plan that appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale." Google had begun working with University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Universities, and the New York City Public Library to digitize public-domain books in their collections. However, unlike the negotiations with book publishers for the print search service, which launched in beta in December, dealings with the libraries were kept under wraps. Internetnews.com has learned that it took two years for Google to come to agreement with these libraries, and the talks were kept secret even from the universities' publishing units. According to the AAUP, digitizing library collections and making them searchable has the potential for serious financial damage to publishers. The AAUP gave Google a list of sixteen questions, from exactly how long is the "snippet" of text the search engine will return in the results to how many digital copies it will make and store. One urgent question relates to the pay-per-use system for which Google has applied for a patent. "What protection do copyright owners have against Google itself deciding to adopt a new business model that involves the direct exploitation of these copies by, for example, offering Google users access through the pay-per-view system for which Google has a patent application pending?" As previously reported, one of Google's many patent applications describes a protocol that would request authorization from a publisher before retrieving a digital version of a book, permitting "subscription-like access."