Matt Jones' Random Acts of Verbiage

Google is doing for books what butter did for toast… what? I am serious. Just think if Google upgraded butter and toast! But I digress.

Google has done it yet again. Print.Google is a new project that aims to digitally scan every single book every printed into their database. Yes, that’s right, I said every.

The idea is that you can search for any book and any text in a book and be able to read portions of the book itself. Once you find the book you want to read, say Ender’s Game, you can then search the text for whatever you want, say Bean, and it will highlight the text on the scanned page. The pages are copyrighted scans and you aren’t able to select the text for copy (amazing that they can highlight the searched text!). Also, to keep copyrights protected, they are only scanning portions of books.

Google is currently in legal battles with publishers because of the copyright stuff but hopefully publishers will realize that this can only help book sales as people will be able to get a better idea about what they want to read / buy. This is an awesome endeavor that I think will really help with literacy, research, libraries, schools, publishers, teachers, authors, and on and on! Go check out what they have done so far at Google Print and be sure to read the Print.Google About Page.

Ή χάρις του κυρίου ημων Ίησου Χριστου μεθ’ υμων.