Google began an ambitious project in 2004: to scan and index the world's paper books and make them searchable online.
Nine years later, the
company has overcome a major roadblock in its mission. On Thursday, a
judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against the Google Books project
brought by authors who claimed the project violated their copyrights.
By sheer numbers, the Google Books project
has been a huge success. More than 20 million books and magazines have
been scanned using optical character-recognition technology, making each
word or phrase searchable, so snippets of text are part of Google
search results.
It also has been a
lightning rod for controversy. Google did not seek approval to scan many
books that were still under copyright, nor did it offer to compensate
authors or publishers in any way, claiming the scans were fair use.
The program doesn't put
entire books online for free. If a book is still under copyright, search
results will only show the brief section that includes the word or
phrase searched for and the page number it appears on, along with
details about the book itself.
Google compares the
system to a card catalog. Books that are out of copyright can be viewed
in full and even downloaded, and people can buy books whose authors or
publishers are part of Google's Partner Program.
The ruling notes that
the majority of the books scanned are out of print, and that Google
provided digital copies to the libraries that allowed them to scan their
collections. The books scanned are also primarily nonfiction titles,
which have less copyright protection than fiction.
The Google database is
used by researchers, librarians and educators and greatly expands access
to books around the world by putting them online. By converting print
to digital text, the program has also made it easier to convert titles
into more accessible formats, like text-to-speech and Braille.
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