Inside Google Books: On the Future of Books

In a recent Blog post, Google revealed that they have now scanned over 15 million books to their online collection.  Quoting from the blog,  Inside Google Books: On the Future of Books the article states:

To date, working with library and publisher partners around the world, we have scanned more than 15 million books from more than 100 countries in over 400 languages as part of the Google Books project we started in 2004. The greater the diversity of content on the web, the more useful it becomes. And the more people who can access the information cataloged in books, the more enlightening those works become.

Just as a test, I ran a Google Book search on the term "genealogy." There were 1,280,000 hits. By adding a surname, "tanner genealogy," I got 12,900 results which included a number of full view books. Full view means that the entire digitized book is available online. 

As far as I can determine, this is the first update from Google as to the number of items in their online collection. Based on the size of the Google collection, they are rapidly gaining on the Library of Congress to be the largest repository of books in the world. 

OK, what is more amazing is the Europeana website reference by Google. To quote:

Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 6 million digital items.

• Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
• Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
• Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe's

• museums and galleries
• archives
• libraries
• audio-visual collections

 This website is a prototype. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 10 million digital objects.

What is more important, here are the terms of use:


Permissions to reuseUnless otherwise indicated in relation to specific elements of the Website, you are free to:

• Share - to copy, transmit, publish, make available, reproduce, distribute, extract, re-utilise, display and store the content of this Website in all forms, formats and media throughout the world;
• Transform - to alter, transform, translate, create adaptations, summaries or extracts of the content of this Website or to make other derivative works based on the content;

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution - You must give attribution to Europeana and the institution(s) whose name appears in connection with the content of the Website and keep all attribution information intact (but not in any way that suggests that those attributed endorse you or your use of the Website or its content);
• Non-commercial - You may not share or transform the Website or its content for commercial purposes.
• Copyleft - Any transformation of the Website or its content must be distributed under the same or compatible licensing conditions as these Terms of Use.

The right to share and transform the content of the Website as described above, does not pertain to previews (such as thumbnails, text, video or audio fragments etc.) displayed on the Website. The terms of use for these previews are displayed alongside individual previews.

Just when you thought you were going to run out of things to look at online and additional places to research!