Google Print: printed books online

RedHerring said:
Google and Yahoo stepped up their battle for consumer eyeballs Thursday with the search engine launching a virtual library while the Internet portal upgraded its mapping service to better challenge Google Maps.

You may not be aware of this, but Google is scanning a lot of books these days! Google Print is the new service (currently in Beta) that allows you to find and review printed books online. When I first went to print.google.com, I was not sure how many books would they have. And was not even sure what to search for. Or how to search! So I put the keyword “computer” and hit search. Wow! They had many books up there! All the familiar book covers came up. Then I dug deeper and reviewed books for PHP. Found 10 books with 45200 pages of content!

What’s really neat, is that you can actually do a full text search on the book. And it will show the pages that have those keywords. Not only that, when you see the image of the page, it actually highlights those search words on the page. You can navigate between pages and hit “More results from this book” to see a list of all pages available.

This must have been some hi-fi OCR stuff! Google had the search technology and now they are putting it to wonderful uses.

At the same time, there are lot of copyright related issues. Google Print had to be suspended for a while due to lot of lawsuits on copyright infringement. Public domain books can how easily be accessed. And preserving public domain work is one of the main goals of Google Print.

But hey, Microsoft and Amazon are now following Google on this!