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Google, top libraries to put books on Web

Oxford, Harvard, Stanford are among project participants

By JOHN MARKOFF AND EDWARD WYATT
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Google, operator of the world's most popular Internet search service and a looming competitor to Microsoft, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the United States' leading research libraries, and Oxford University, to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be searchable for free over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions -- which also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library -- is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Google -- newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer -- has agreed to underwrite the projects while adding its own technical capabilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands a pages a day at each library. Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict that the project could take at least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the agreements are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon.com -- which already has limited searches available for books it sells. Like Google, those companies may seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes, for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today," said Michael Keller, Stanford's head librarian.

The Google effort and others like it that are already under way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend to potentially democratize access to information that has long been available to only a small elite group of students and scholars.

Last night, the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of 1 million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by April.

"Having the great libraries at your fingertips allows us to build on and create great works based on the work of others," said Brewster Kahle, founder and president of the Internet Archive, a digital library based in San Francisco that is also trying to digitize existing print information.

Google's agreements will allow the company to publish the full text of only those library books old enough to no longer be under copyright. For copyrighted works, Google would scan in the entire text but make only short excerpts available online.



Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google plans to digitize nearly all the 8 million books in Stanford's collection and the 7 million at Michigan. The Harvard project will initially be limited to only about 40,000 volumes. The scanning at Oxford's Bodleian Library will be limited to an unspecified number of books published before 1900, while the New York Public Library project will involve fragile material not under copyright that library officials said would be of interest primarily to scholars.

The trend toward online libraries and virtual card catalogs is one that already has book publishers scrambling to respond.

At least a dozen major publishing companies, including some of the United States' biggest producers of non-fiction books -- the primary target for the online text-search efforts -- have already entered ventures with Google and Seattle-based Amazon.com that allow users to search the text of copyrighted books online and read excerpts. Publishers including HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic have signed up for the Google and Amazon programs. The largest U.S. trade publisher, Random House, participates in Amazon's program but is still negotiating with Google, which calls its program Google Print.

The Amazon and Google programs work by restricting the access of users to only a few pages of a copyrighted book during each search, offering enough to enable them to order the printed book if it seems to fulfill their requirements. Those features restrict a user's ability to copy, cut or print the copyrighted material, while limiting on-screen reading to a few pages at a time. Books still under copyright at the libraries involved in Google's new project are likely to be protected by similar restrictions.

The challenge for publishers in coming years will be to continue to have libraries serve as major influential buyers of their books, without letting the newly vast digital public reading rooms undermine the companies' ability to make money commissioning and publishing authors' work.

Based on his experiences with Amazon's and Google's commercial search services so far, David Steinberger, president and chief executive of Perseus Books Group, said, "I think there is minimal risk, or virtually no risk, of copyrighted material being misused." But he said he would object to a library's providing copyrighted material online without a license. "If you're talking about the instantaneous, free distribution of books, I think that would represent a problem," Steinberger said.

For their part, libraries themselves will have to rethink their central missions as storehouses of printed, indexed material.

"Our world is about to change in a big, big way," said Daniel Greenstein, university librarian for the California Digital Library of the University of California, which is a project to organize and retain existing digital materials.

Instead of expending considerable time and money to manage their collections of printed materials, Greenstein said, libraries in the future can devote more energy to gathering information and making it accessible -- and more easily manageable -- online.

But Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library, says he sees Web access as an expansion of libraries' reach, not as a replacement for physical collections. "Librarians will add a new dimension to their work," LeClerc said. "They will not abandon their mission of collecting printed material and keeping them for decades and even centuries."

Google hopes to be able to scan 50,000 pages per library per day within the month, eventually doubling that rate, according to a person involved in the project.

The Google plan calls for making the library materials available as part of Google's regular Web service, which currently has an estimated 8 billion Web pages in its database and tens of millions of users a day. As with the other information on its service, Google will sell advertising to generate revenue from its library material.

At least initially, Google's digitizing task will be labor-intensive, with people placing the books and documents on sophisticated scanners whose high-resolution cameras capture an image of each page and convert it to a digital file.

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