Controversial Google Print Scanning Europe

The search engine company has begun scanning books in eight European countries and will digitize books in their local languages.

Books from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland will be fed to the Google Print project; these books will be made searchable in their printed languages. Scanning efforts in the listed countries have started.

Google Print started as a project to scan and digitize the contents of books from five repositories: the New York Public Library, and university libraries from Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, and Stanford.

Publishers have complained about the project, and Google has tried to address those concerns. Citing fair use provisions in copyright law, Google believes it has the right to scan these books. The company said it will not make entire books available online, but enough content to provide relevant search results depending on queries made.

That hasn’t been enough to satisfy organizations like the Association of American Publishers or the Authors Guild, which has sued Google over the project. However, some European publishers and libraries have endorsed Google Print. and no one has filed a suit in Europe yet.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.