Google to digitize University of California libraries

In a move that already has the Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in an uproar, Google has secured rights to digitize all the books in 100+ libraries spread throughout the University of California's 10 campuses.

The Google Book Search initiative is premised around scanning any and every book it can obtain, then allowing users to search for a book based on its contents and how they correspond to the user's search parameters. This is important to Google because the more content that is searchable, the more users Google can attract, and the more pay-clicks it can generate through its AdWords mechanism.

Google Book Search's main competitor is the Open Content Alliance (OCA), an open-source counter move launched by Microsoft and Yahoo!, which has already secured rights to the University of California libraries 'un-copyrighted' works.

The Google Book Search initiative differs from the OCA in two distinct ways.

1) The digitized material obtained by Google will be searchable only via Google while the OCA will have its digitized works available via Yahoo!, the OCA's own public portal, and will support various initatives to expose the data to the public.
2) The OCA is digitizing only un-copyrighted works, while Google is digitizing both copyrighted and un-copyrighted works.

The second point surrounding digitizing copyrighted works has landed Google in the familiar hot-seat as it is facing two lawsuits by the Association of American Publishers and Authors Guild, respectively. Google however contends that it is not breaking any copyright laws and is within the realm of 'fair-use' because it does not display the full copyrighted texts, only snippets of text, but allows the work to be identified via search.

The OCA has so far amassed a greater collection of works, although only un-copyrighted works. In the academic realms Google has signed on Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan.

Yahoo! will thus eventually have a respectable book search, but will not be the leader in the field as the OCA's digitized archives will be available via other channels. Yahoo! also does not provide as robust a search as Google, which will identify for a user all relevant works, including copyrighted material (though they will limit the content that is displayed).

This is a huge win for Google, as the more copyrighted materials it can get a hold of, the more it will distance itself from competitors.