Google’s Library Continues To Grow

By NewsFactor Network | January 22, 2007

Google is adding more content to its quickly growing electronic catalog of books. The search giant has announced that another university library has joined its project to put the world’s books online.

More than one million titles at the University of Texas library in Austin will be converted to digital format and added to the Google Books Library Project.

The items to be archived include parts of the library’s Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, featuring over 960,000 works from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, and Central America. These books chronicle the history, politics, and society of the region, and include the works of notable Latin American authors.

“Joining with Google’s Book Search program will mean that the intellectual content of our collections are discoverable by a much wider range of scholars and students,” Fred Heath, vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Texas, said in a statement explaining the school’s decision to put its collection online.

Who Owns the Books?

Google launched the controversial book project, originally called Google Print, in November 2005 with collections from Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.

However, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has taken a lot of heat over the project from the beginning, as publishers have raised concern over copyright issues.

Google claims it is only concentrating on material that is in the public domain. The company has argued that it is well within its rights to scan such books and put the content online.

But the project stalled last summer due to copyright litigation. Then in September 2006, the Authors Guild filed a suit in federal court charging that Google’s plan to digitize the entire collections of five libraries violated the copyrights of those books’ authors.

From Paper to BlackBerry

The Texas book initiative will be part of…

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