Google has entered the initial batch of scanned books to its searchable online index, the first fruits of the company's controversial partnership with five major research libraries.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Unknown

The Library Project, part of the company's Google Print program, has been digitizing books for nearly a year in an arrangement with Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library. Until now, though, those scanned books had not been part of the Google index.

Adam M. Smith, a senior business-product manager at Google who is working on the book-scanning project, said in an interview this month that "thousands" of library books â€" he would not give an exact number â€" are now in the index. All of the books so far added to the index were in the public domain, he said.

Google's Library Project has come under fire, including two lawsuits from groups of publishers and authors, because the company plans to scan not only books in the public domain but also those that are under copyright.

The company says search results will include only brief excerpts from books still protected by copyright, but publishers and authors argue that Google must obtain permission before scanning a copyrighted work.

For public-domain books, Google users can read the entire book, save pages to their computers, and cut and paste content from the books.