Google intends to scan every books ever published, and to make full texts searchable, in the same way that web sites can be searched on the company’s search engine at google.com.
Google’s goal is to create an index of all the books in the world that can be searched using Google.
The project started around 2003 when Google approached the Library of Congress with proposal to digitize all the books in the library. The Library of Congress offered a counterproposal that would only include public domain books, Google did not follow up.
In the December 2004 Google announcing that it would be digitizing the entire print collections of the New York Public Library and prestigious university libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard , Stanford and Oxford, which would cover more than 15 million volumes.
The University of California, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Virginia and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid joined in 2006.
The Google Book project is one of the most revolutionary information policy changes in a century or more.
History of Google Books Project
