Google Opens Its Online Library

Google Inc. is making available thousands of public-domain works through its search engine today, the first large-scale results of a program to scan books and documents at several university and public libraries.

Users will be able to search for keywords in the text of the works Google is putting online and read the entirety of the texts -- at print.google.com -- through digital images of the book pages. They can also save individual pages and cut and paste selected content drawn from the collections of the University of Michigan, Stanford University, Harvard University and the New York Public Library.

Google, of Mountain View, Calif., has been hit with two lawsuits by publishers and authors over its library project; their concerns relate to the scanning of copyrighted works in the libraries.

It's unlikely that many in the book publishing community will be upset by Google's latest move. While the classics are one of the most hotly contested subsets in the public-domain arena, there are already numerous organizations that enable users to view and download copies free of charge.

The Open Library site, www.openlibrary.org, was created by the nonprofit Internet Archive and lets consumers view high-quality scans of public-domain books, download entire books or have a book printed and shipped to them for a fee. The Internet Archive is part of the Open Content Alliance, a recently formed coalition of libraries and companies including Google rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Google said the works it is making available include Civil War regimental histories, government documents, books by Henry James and biographies of wealthy New Yorkers. The company said it won't display advertisements on public domain book pages or any book pages Google scans from a library.

About 18% of the books held by the libraries working with Google were printed before 1923 and therefore are in the public domain, according to an analysis by the Online Computer Library Center, a Dublin, Ohio, nonprofit library cooperative. An unknown percentage of the rest are in the public domain also, depending on whether their copyrights were renewed.

Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com