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The point of Google Print
10/19/2005 02:04:00 PM
Posted by Adam Mathes, Associate Product Manager, Google Print Team
You may have read about the AAP's lawsuit announced today which objects to Google Print. We'll post our comments about that soon. Meanwhile, we offer this commentary from Eric Schmidt. It ran on the op-ed page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, and we are reprinting it in full with that paper's permission.

Books of Revelation
By Eric Schmidt
The Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2005

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

That's the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced last fall to help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world's books. Recently, some members of the publishing industry who believe this program violates copyright law have been fighting to stop it. We respectfully disagree with their conclusions, on both the meaning of the law and the spirit of a program which, in fact, will enhance the value of each copyright. Here's why.

Google's job is to help people find information. Google Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books. When you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, contain your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and, at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear.
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