Google in book digitizing contract with University of California

Stan Beer
Thursday, 10 August 2006 17:50

Your IT - Home IT

In its quest to scan the world's libraries of books and put them online in searchable form, Google has struck a deal with the University of California to digitize millions of books across the institutions' libraries spread across 10 campuses.

The latest deal adds the libraries of the University of California to the already vast collection books in other substantial libraries, including the prestigious universities of Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress and the University of Michigan.

The Google digitizing project has run afoul of publisher and author groups, who have sued the search company because the project includes books that are still in copyright as well as out of copyright books.

However, Google has countered its litigous critics by invoking fair use and saying that searches on the copyrighted works would only contain snippets of information similar to what Amazon publishes about books it sells on its site.

A rival open source project called the Open Content Alliance, sponsored by both Microsoft and Yahoo, is only digitizing books which are out of copyright and has thus escaped the ire of the publishing community.