Google Books is a very popular service of Google that is being used by thousands of users all over the world daily. Through this feature the public can have access to millions of free books on all the subjects and topics and thus form a very important source of learning. Through the use of this feature you can attain access to many books from your own PC and you don’t have to go to libraries or other sources to get what you need.

The service of the Google book search was introduced in 2004 as an effective tool to search for full text books. Google has created a large data base of books by scanning them and placing them on the servers. These books are converted to text using the features of optical character recognition. The digital library of Google is one of the largest libraries in the world. The book search may be used a specific feature from the home page of the Google or the relevant books that are shown in the general search can be used. People generally use the general search feature to find all that they need including the books.

Many of the books that do not contain the copyrighted material or have sufficient permission is available free of cost the users. They can even download the free PDF copies or print the material that they need. However in case of the copy righted material a limited number of the pages are available to the users so that they know whether they have to or they don’t have to purchase the books. In some cases only a few lines of the books are visible. But Google gives the references of the book sellers or the publishers along with the book from where the book can be easily purchased. The books are also searched for the relevant ads and Google places content related ads along with the books. Many of the Google books do not have hard copies and can be purchased only in soft copy.

Google owns the world biggest store of the digital books. The second largest was the Live Search Books which was a feature of Microsoft. Few years back the Microsoft abandoned the project and now all the books are freely available at the Internet archive. Other big digital libraries include Europeana, Gallica and Hathi Trust. A wide range of books, photos, manuscripts and paintings are available at these databases.

Google book project was widely appreciated by the libraries and many world renowned institutions like the Harvard University, Stanford University, Michigan University and the Oxford University became the initial partners of the Google library project. The main aim was to digitalize over one million books in the world and make them accessible to the people at large through internet. However some authors and publishers criticized Google because of violating the copy rights of the books and suits were filed against Google. But in the greater benefit of the human civilization many libraries are still helping Google in developing and improving their program.


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