Google Books
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IntroductionSee eBooks: an introduction, Google Health & GoogleCoop - Health and Google scholar Google Books (previously Google Book Search and Google Print) is a subfile of regular Google that allows searchers to search the full text of millions of books that the search giant has scanned, converted to text and stored. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced in 2004. Google's Library Project, also now known as Google Book Search, was announced in late 2004. The goal of Google Books is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual catalogue of all books in all languages. Google announced in 2010 that it will launch a new service called Google Editions and compete head-to-head with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and other ebook retailers. Unlike other vendors, Google Editions will be completely online and will not require specific devices such as Kindles or iPads. Google Books has also digitized large numbers of journal back issues. However, the digital files of scholarly journals have not yet been described with the metadata needed to identify each of the millions of journal articles available in digital formats. Google scholar has started its own digitization plan to host older journal articles pending agreement with publishers. How many books?By 2007, Google had digitized one million books at an estimated cost of US$5 million. By 2008, Google said it had digitized seven million books including those scanned by 20,000 publishing partners. Of those 7 million books, 1 million are "full preview" based on agreements with publishers; and, one million are in the public domain. Most scanned works are no longer in print or commercially available. In 2010, Google says that the number of scanned digital books in its collection is likely well over ten million and counting... Searching fulltext of booksSearch the full text of Books at Google Book Search http://books.google.com/books
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Books signify cultureIn the monograph "Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe" Jean-Noël Jeanneney, President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France critiques the Google Book project. With a foreword from Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, the book is well-argued and places Google's project as a form of cultural politics and hegemony. However, Google's push to digitize has motivated the digitization of European print culture. Google Books provides an important building block of the digital future - so why the fuss? When Google announced its plans to digitize the world's knowledge (15 million books from five major research libraries in the US and UK), Jeanneney responded with "When Google Challenges Europe" in Le Monde. His 'cri du coeur' became a book which was published as Quand Google défie l'Europe: Plaidoyer pour un sursaut. Even President Chirac endorsed his views and called for France to take leadership in book digitization. Jeanneney's cultural "call to arms" prompted increases in international collaboration in book digitization to counter what some see as the risks posed by Google. Jeanneney presides over one of the largest book digitization projects at the BNF <http://gallica.bnf.fr/>. He has been instrumental in mobilizing France and the national librarians of Europe to increase book digitization, launch a European Digital Library, and fund creation of an R&D program for search technologies. Naturally, Google is not able to digitize everything and its selection of content favours American and English books over others. Its presentation of text is based on keywords and fragments them in culturally damaging ways; some librarians say its linking to advertising permits sloppy imaging at the expense of carefully executed efforts. Google promotes search results that are inconsistent with the rankings of scholars from cultures where the literature originates. Further, permitting a multinational company to own digital files does not represent sound archival planning and defeats efforts to encourage proper preservation approaches. Canadian contextReferences
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