Google plans to continue with the Google Library project, scanning books under copyright that are owned by participating libraries, despite the protests of publishers’ organizations.


Google will continue to scan whole collections of books owned by libraries participating in the Google Scanning Project.

Google has begun stand alone book searches in 14 countries.The international book search services will allow users in the UK, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Pakistan, American Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Jamaica, Mauritius and Uganda search English-language books. Users from these countries can type in keywords and then read passages from the books where these words appear.

Jim Gerber, Google’s director of content partnerships said that the indexes of books may differ from country to country, in order to comply with local copyright laws.

According to Gerber, Google offers three different kinds of book search results in the U.S. and abroad. The entire book will be available for Public domain books. For books under copyright, specified amounts of content will be available.

The company’s statement says: “We are currently scanning public domain works of our library partners. Starting November 1st, we will expand our scanning to include the full collections of these libraries”.

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