22 Facts About Google Books

Google Books is a service from Google Inc that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database.

Additionally, Google Books has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.

Google Books estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world, and stated that it intended to scan all of them.

Google Books stated that it would not scan any in-copyright books between August and 1 November 2005, to provide the owners with the opportunity to decide which books to exclude from the Project.

Google Books expended considerable resources in coming up with optimal compression techniques, aiming for high image quality while keeping the file sizes minimal to enable access by internet users with low bandwidth.

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Scholars have frequently reported rampant errors in the metadata information on Google Books – including misattributed authors and erroneous dates of publication.

Google Books responded to Nunberg by blaming the bulk of errors on the outside contractors.

Google Books has shown only limited interest in cleaning up these errors.

Project is the subject of the Authors Guild v Google lawsuit, filed in 2005 and ruled in favor of Google in 2013, and again, on appeal, in 2015.

Google Books announced partnerships with several high-profile university and public libraries, including the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library.

Google Books would provide a digital copy of all works scanned to be incorporated into the university's own library system.

September 2007: Google added a feature that allows users to share snippets of books that are in the public domain.

September 2007: Google debuted a new feature called "My Library" which allows users to create personal customized libraries, selections of books that they can label, review, rate, or full-text search.

February 2009: Google Books launched a mobile version of Google Books Book Search, allowing iPhone and Android phone users to read over 1.

May 2009: At the annual BookExpo convention in New York, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.

December 2010: Google Books launched the Ngram Viewer, which collects and graphs data on word usage across its book collection.

April 2016: The US Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild's appeal, which means the lower court's decision stood, and Google would be allowed to scan library books and display snippets in search results without violating the law.

Google Books appealed that decision, with a number of amici asserting the inadequacy of the class, and the Second Circuit rejected the class certification in July 2013, remanding the case to the District Court for consideration of Google Books's fair use defense.

In 2015 Authors Guild filed another appeal against Google to be considered by the 2nd U S Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

Google Books won the case unanimously based on the argument that they were not showing people the full texts but instead snippets, and they are not allowing people to illegally read the book.

The court wrote, "Google violated author copyright laws by fully reproducing and making accessible" books that Seuil owns without its permission and that Google "committed acts of breach of copyright, which are of harm to the publishers".

In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google Books of violating copyright law with their book search service.