Brief

Google messes up free e-book search

Google is back in limelight for a book search engine that offers access to books that are in the public domain. Unfortunately, Google is not the first to offer access to public domain e-books. Gutenberg.net, founded in 1971, offers the same service, except that it does it much better. Project Gutenberg has made 19,000 books available to date.

Google’s re-inventing the wheel, with hooks to its famous search engine. In the case of copyrighted books, only the bibliographies and limited extracts will be displayed. The company has said that users can choose from a wide collection of public domain titles including Aesop’s Fables, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dante’s Inferno for free.

Unfortunately, many popular titles (such as the earliest books of Agatha Christie and P G Wodehouse) that are available on Gutenberg are nowhere to be found except in commercial editions on Google.

This offering from Google is a part of the larger project that the company has undertaken with universities to digitise works of libraries such as Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library, with the University of California joining the board recently.

As always, Google has been able to generate enough steam over its new offering despite the fact that free books have been available on the Net for quite a while. But its implementation leaves much to be desired. One wonders if the company is worried about putting publishers out of business by offering easy access to free e-books. The company’s full text search has come in for a lot of criticism with lawsuits having been filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.