Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search and Google Print) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database.
The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. Google's Library Project, also now known as Google Book Search, was announced in December 2004.
Google Books URL: http://books.google.com
To download books we need a tool which is as follows:
Google Books Downloader: http://www.gbooksdownloader.com/gbooks.exe
Results from Google Book Search show up in both general web search at Google.com and through the dedicated Google Books site (books.Google.com). Up to three results from the Google Books index may be displayed, if relevant, above other search results in the Google Web search service (Google.com).
Subscribing users can click on a result from Google Books that opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book, if out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. Books in the public domain are available in "full view" and free for download.
For in-print books, Google limits the number of viewable pages through a variety of access limitations and security measures, some based on user-tracking. For books that may be covered by copyright and where the owner has not been identified, only "snippets" (two to three lines of text) are shown, though the full text of the book is searchable.
Most scanned works are no longer in print or commercially available. For those which are, the site provides links to the website of the publisher and booksellers.
The Google Books database continues to grow. For users outside the United States, though, Google must be sure that the work in question is indeed out of copyright under local laws.
According to a member of the Google Books Support Team, "Since whether a book is in the public domain can often be a tricky legal question, we err on the side of caution and display at most a few snippets until we have determined that the book has entered the public domain."
Users outside the United States can however access a large number of public domain books scanned by Google using copies stored on the Internet Archive.
Many of the books are scanned using the Elphel 323 camera at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour.
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The initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge, but it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations.
As of 2010, the number of scanned books is over 15 millions Google estimated in 2010 that there are about 130 million unique books in the world, and that it intends to scan all of them by the end of the decades.
