Google计划允许客户在网上查阅书籍
Google Goes to College
Google Inc . announced plans Tuesday to let consumers use its search engine to access millions of books from the libraries of some top U.S. and foreign universities.
In a dramatic expansion to an existing Google service that makes books searchable online, the Mountain View, Calif., company will scan the entire library of the University of Michigan, which includes seven million volumes. It also will make available online large parts of the libraries at Stanford University and the University of Oxford, as well as books from Harvard University and the New York Public Library.
The initiative has the potential to change the way people view their libraries, as they are able to find information from books without ever setting foot in the library itself. It also intensifies Google's competition with Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc., which itself offers a service for searching within books.
Under the new program, consumers will be able to type key words into Google's main Web search site just as they currently do. Links to portions of text from the library books will then show up in the results. The books-related results will be set apart at the top of the search-result page. When users click on a book-related result, they will see images of the relevant scanned pages with their search terms highlighted.
Depending on agreements with a book's publisher or author, the user will then be able to browse a portion of the book or the entirety. Starting today, some of the books already digitized at the University Michigan will go online. Piggybacking on a separate database, Google's service allows consumers to type in their ZIP Code and see if books that show up in their search results are owned by libraries near them.
A BOOK DEAL FOR GOOGLE
Some details on the company's new digital project
? Consumers can access the text of millions of books using the same keyword searches they currently use
? The searches will include books from the University of Michigan, Harvard University and Stanford University
? Consumers can only browse through certain portions of copyrighted books
The project is part of Google's ambitious goal of making all the world's information searchable. It will take a number of years for all the university library books to be scanned. The University of Michigan says only about 10,000 of its books have been scanned since work began during late summer, and that it will take approximately six years for its entire collection to be digitized. Among the titles that have been scanned thus far: "Darwin and After Darwin" by George John Romanes and originally published in 1892; and "The Return of the Middle Class" by John Corbin. Google declined to comment on many specific details of the program.
Some universities already had begun scanning the text of books in their collections, but at a slow pace and largely without licensing agreements for making copyrighted works broadly available. The University of Michigan, the alma mater of Google co-founder Larry Page, was scanning about 5,000 books a year on its own. The university said the program with Google will scan roughly 5,000 books a day when it gets up to speed.
In addition to showing the relevant passages, Google will allow consumers to browse the full texts of books that no longer are covered under copyright, which in the U.S. generally includes most books published before 1923. The company also has agreements with a number of publishers to let consumers browse parts of the text of their copyrighted books.
Google has said the publishers participating in its existing Google Print program, under which it has been scanning parts of publishers' recent book catalogs, include Pearson PLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Walt Disney Co.'s Hyperion, Scholastic Inc. and Oxford University Press. For books where Google hasn't negotiated agreements to offer access to the text, it will show either short snippets of text or just the book's bibliographical information.
Google will need the cooperation of the country's big book publishers to make its search feature truly reader friendly. One of the biggest publishers, BertelsmannAG's Random House Inc., is in talks with Google but hasn't yet struck a deal. "Providing a citation is one thing," says Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House Ventures. "Linking to the page of the text is something else."
Many publishers welcome the project, saying they expect the Google search option will boost sales of previously published titles that otherwise would languish in the warehouse. Closely held Avalon Publishing Group Inc. of Emeryville, Calif., says its success with the "Search inside the book" function on Amazon's Web site prompted it to make a deal with Google. Avalon has provided Google with digitized files of 400 books and will add 1,600 more in the next 18 months. Another publisher, Perseus Books LLC, a unit of private-equity firm Perseus LLC, says it has agreed to give Google "thousands of titles."
Google provides links to online booksellers, including Amazon.com, alongside the images of the scanned book pages. It shares revenue from ads its places on pages showing the text of books with publishers in its Google Print program, but said it has no immediate plans to show ads on the books scanned at libraries.
While people now will be able to do research using library books without going to the library, many librarians predict it will only stimulate interest in books and library usage itself. "We had this conversation when the Internet began to get popular, and what's happened is that library visits have doubled in the last decade to 1.2 billion," says Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association, which has more than 64,000 members.
The universities say they won't receive any money from Google for participating in the program, but Google will give them the scanned versions of the books.
Amazon says consumers can search within the text of hundreds of thousands of books using its "Search inside the book" feature. A spokesman declined to comment on any increased competition with Google
Google计划允许客户在网上查阅书籍
预计Google Inc.将于今日宣布以下计划，即允许客户通过使用其搜索引擎查阅部分美国及外国顶尖大学图书馆内数百万的藏书。
Google目前正对自身已经设立的在线搜索图书的服务进行急速扩张。该公司将把密歇根大学(University of Michigan)的整个图书馆扫描进数据库，其中包括700万册图书。另外，Google还将使客户在线浏览斯坦福大学(Stanford University)和牛津大学(University of Oxford)图书馆的大部分藏书以及哈佛大学(Harvard University)和纽约公共图书馆(New York Public Library)的书籍。
此举将有可能改变人们看待图书馆的方式，因为人们今后足不出户便可以从书中查找信息。此举还将加剧Google与互联网零售商亚马逊公司(Amazon.com Inc.)之间的竞争。
