Google has resumed scanning copyrighted books, Mr. Smith said. It had temporarily stopped scanning those works to give publishers a chance to give the company lists of books that they did not want scanned.

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Author: Young, Jeffrey R.

Some of the copyrighted books would begin to appear in the Google index "very shortly," he said.

From now on, said Nathan Tyler, a spokesman for Google, "we're going to be constantly adding new books to the index as they become available."

The books now in full-text form on Google include Civil War regimental histories from the University of Michigan's library, government documents from Stanford's collection, works by Henry James from Harvard's libraries, and biographies from the New York Public Library's holdings.

John P. Wilkin, associate university librarian at Michigan, would not say how quickly the books are being scanned but did say the process is growing more and more efficient.

Google and its collaborators are not the only consortium seeking to digitize large collections of books and make them easily searchable online. A rival search-engine company, Yahoo, has joined with Microsoft, numerous academic libraries, and other partners in a similar project called the Open Content Alliance.

Leaders of that project, however, have pledged that no books that are under copyright will be scanned unless the copyright holders give their explicit permission.

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By Jeffrey R. Young