NYTimes.com: Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book SearchEffort

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort
By EDWARD WYATT

FRANKFURT, Oct. 17 - Google said Monday that it had begun operating
local-language sites in eight European countries for its Google Print
program, its closely watched effort to make all of the world's books
searchable online, expanding into territories where it has drawn fierce
criticism.

The Google Print sites - for France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands,
Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain - enable users to search books
provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books
in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights.

Susan Wojcicki, a vice president for product management at Google, said in
an interview Monday that the new sites currently could be used to search
only a relatively small number of books. Many of those have been scanned
since August, when the company, seeking to expand its online book program,
began approaching European publishers.

Google is planning to discuss the new sites this week at the Frankfurt
Book Fair, one of the largest annual gatherings of publishers, agents and
authors. A Google executive is also scheduled to take part in a three-hour
panel discussion on Friday about the numerous competing efforts to
digitize books.

That discussion is also to include Jean-Nel Jeanneney, the president of
the French National Library, who began advocating for a European effort to
digitize and catalog the Continent's library collections soon after Google
announced agreements with five major libraries last December to digitize
their collections of 15 million books and documents.

The European sites work much the same as the main Google Print site
(print.google.com). A user searching the German site, print.google.de, for
a word will receive links to books containing that word. The user can see
some of the pages in each book where the word appears, review the book's
bibliographic information and link to retailers that will sell the book
directly to the user.

Eventually, the European sites will give users access to data about
foreign-language books in the collections of the New York Public Library
and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford.

Among the European publishers that have signed pacts with Google are Grupo
Planeta and Grupo Anaya of Spain, De Boeck and Editions De L'Eclat of
France and Springer Science & Business Media of Holland.

copyright 2005 the New York Times

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