Fabulous range of books online for FREE



It may just be in Beta version but enjoy while you can. You need to register with Google which is easy peasy.



Lonely Planet Thailand - only just out of date edition



What is Google Print?

Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Print aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily – right in your Google search results.



How does Google Print work?

Just do a search on the Google Print homepage. When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you'll see the page of the book that has your search terms, along with other information about the book and "Buy this Book" links to online bookstores (you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the title’s bibliographic data and brief snippets). You can also search for more information within that specific book and find nearby libraries that have it.



Where do these books come from?

The book content in Google Print comes from two sources: publishers and libraries.

 

Edited by: wowpow  at: 3/11/05 10:58 am

legal challenges to this. I thought they were going to publish books that were available in public libraries as well.

One of the aims is to scan, page by page, the books in the public domain of the World's great libraries. A massive wealth of information will be available worldwide.



Books in copyright will be protected but most will be tmepted to make some portions available to encourage readers to buy



BBC News 1 hour ago

First Google Print books launched

 

The first works from Google Print's project have been unveiled

The first group of works scanned and put online by the Google Print project has been unveiled. Included in this opening swathe are many 19th Century works of American literature and history.The works were chosen because they are uncopyrighted works that are unaffected by the legal action that briefly halted Google's digitisation project.



The legal challenge comes from the Authors Guild which claims it involves "massive copyright infringement".

Legal row



Books about the US Civil War, government papers and the writings of Henry James are among the works donated by project participants for the first group of online works.



"Today we welcome the world to our library," said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, in a statement. The entire text of these works is being put online by the search giant's digitisation project. The text will be searchable and users will be able to save images of pages.



Google has enrolled Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford University in the digitisation project. The search giant said the first focus of the digitisation plan would be books in the public domain, so-called orphaned works and titles that have gone out of print.



Eventually Google hopes the collection of works it will put online will dwarf this first group of works.



The plan to put books online was unveiled a year ago but has run into legal challenges that temporarily halted the systematic scanning operation.



The US Authors Guild along with five large publishers have gone to court to stop Google scanning copyrighted works without getting explicit permission from rights holders.



Despite the legal challenge this week Google re-started its scanning project to put books online.



As well as legal challenges Google faces competition from a similar rival plan to scan books by the Open Content Alliance which counts Microsoft, Yahoo and the Internet Archive among its backers.