The Google Print search engine, which was covered in an earlier posting, has now launched as a standalone Google search service with its own front page. Previously, Google Print results were listed within Google’s standard results pages.
Google Print is basically a Google search of books. Google has invited publishers to send them pdf versions of their books or to let Google scan them - the incentive for publishers to do this is that they could be rewarded by increased sales of the books they allow Google to hold on its database (in the search results, a link to ‘buy this book’ is offered - Google says it gets no revenue from this). Also, Google has been (and is, as I write this, and will be for many years to come) scanning books and storing them as digital - and searchable - text files in collaboration with a select few large U.S. academic libraries plus the U.K.’s Bodleian Library at Oxford. The submissions of books by publishers is known as The Project for Publishers and Google’s own library scanning venture is known as the The Library Project. I like to think of Google Print as a way of extending the internet back in time, theoretically back to the 1450s and the invention of the printing press - and perhaps even earlier (when Google can develop reliable enough handwriting recognition software)!
Just type your search term in Google Print and any book which includes that term within its pages will be listed in the results (along with a small image of the book’s cover). Clicking on a book in the results displays an image of the page on which the search term appears (helpfully highlighted for you) and you can view a couple of pages either side of the found page. The small matter of copyright means that Google shows only a couple of pages of works still in copyright (which, generally, means those written less than 75 years ago - but this varies between different countries and depends on the edition of the work). So, you cannot just read the whole book and after browsing a few pages Google will ask you to log in (eg with your Gmail account) or create an account if you want to see more pages.
In fact, the Google Print project has been the subject of much negative comment recently and is accused of being in breach of copyright. Business Week had a good article: A Google Project Pains Publishers and even published the text of a letter sent to Google by American publishers: The University Press Assn.’s Objections (also pdf version). An excellent article in Information Today sets out the whole thing very clearly.
In addition, Europe wants to start up a competitor to Google Print to broaden the scope away from mostly English language texts. Then there’s the Internet Archive which has existed for years, not to mention a number of websites already offering full texts of out of copyright books, especially fiction, (notably Project Gutenberg), some listed in the column to the left.
I tried searching for Moby Dick (written in 1851, so it should be well out of copyright) in Google Print. I could not quickly find an unrestricted out of copyright edition. I searched for it at Project Gutenberg, and immediately came up with at least four unrestricted full text versions (albeit not images of actual book pages, but plain text files labouriously typed/scanned in by volunteers). So, Google Print is perhaps not the best source for out of copyright full text access, but it is superb as a book browsing service.