Google Goes Inside the Book, But No Link to Libraries

-- Library Journal, 10/11/2004

Until last week, Google had always lacked one of the most important sources of content: the printed book. Now Google's Google Print, like Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book," enables users to browse book content, which is delivered via ordinary search results. The search term appears in a brief excerpt from the book along with the book's title, author and page number. Users can further search the book, but can only browse two pages backward and forward from where the search term appears. Google has disabled the copy and paste function, to ensure that a book's content isn't copied illegally. Google wouldn't say how many titles have been already scanned, but the number is believed to easily top 100,000.

A prominent features of the excerpt page is "Buy this Book" with links to Amazon.com, BN.com, and Booksense. Participating publishers get two links to their own web sites. But what about "Borrow this Book?" There was no word on whether a relationship was in the works between the book content and the bibliographic records OCLC supplies Google. OCLC's Open WorldCat program, which is providing over one million records to Google (as well as Yahoo), connects users to the closest participating library that owns the book. Chip Nilges, OCLC's Director of WorldCat Content and Global Access, said, "At present there is not a relationship between Google's book program and our metadata. We have added over 2 million records and in October we're expanding that to include the whole WorldCat database to our partners--although the rate of indexing is up to them. Obviously we would be very interested in a relationship with Google's book program but we haven't discussed it." Google spokesperson Nathan Tyler said, "This sounds very interesting but we don't have any future product plans to announce at this time."