Launch of Google Books

Google Books is a service that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, in cooperation with libraries such as those of Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and the New York Public Library. It began as Google Print and was publicly launched in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. Users can read whole books that are in the public domain, and snippets or limited previews of those still protected by copyright. The project was challenged in court by authors and publishers, who argued that copying whole books was a violation, and after years of litigation, courts ruled that the use was fair use. Millions of books were scanned in this way, which made Google Books a huge digital library as well as a research tool.

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