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About Google Books

Facts & Fiction

Fiction: Google Books lets you download any book in the world for free.

Fact: Google Books helps you search within and discover books, not download or read books without paying for them. So when you find a book that's still under copyright, you'll see only a small portion of the book at a time–either the Snippet View or the Sample Pages View–plus links to places where you can buy or borrow it. If you find a book that's out of copyright, however, we're able to display the Full Book View. (You can read more about public domain books in Google Books here).

Fiction: You say you're only showing small snippets of books under copyright, but I see whole pages, so you must be infringing copyright.

Fact: Whenever you can see more than a few snippets of an in-copyright book in Google Books, it's because the author or publisher has joined our Partner Programme and granted us permission to show you the Sample Pages View, which helps you learn enough about a book to know whether you want to buy it. This is something we do with a publisher's explicit permission.

Fiction: If a book is still under copyright, scanning it without permission is illegal.

Fact: This is probably the most common misconception about Google Books, and about copyright law in general. If a library book is in the public domain (out of copyright) it is shown in its entirety. If it is in copyright then users just see basic background (such as the book’s title and the author’s name), at most two or three snippets from the book and information about which library it is in, or where it can be bought. If publishers or authors don't want to have their books digitised, they just have to say so and we exclude them. 

We've carefully designed Google Books to make sure our use of books is fair and fully consistent with the law. Copyright law is aimed at protecting and enhancing the value of creative works in order to encourage more of them–in this case, to ensure that authors write and publishers publish. We believe that by creating new opportunities for readers to find and buy books, we can help authors and publishers sell more of them. You can read more about fair use here.

Fiction: This project would be okay except that Google isn't letting authors and publishers choose whether or not their books appear in Google Books.

Fact: Any publisher or other copyright holder can easily exclude their titles from Google Books at any time, for any reason. We've posted the details on how to do that here and have a support team standing by to help anyone who has trouble doing it on their own.

It's worth bearing in mind, however, that under no circumstances will anyone ever see a full page of an in-copyright book through Google Books without the copyright holder's permission; when a book is under copyright, we show only snippets of text surrounding the search term unless the copyright holder has given us explicit permission to show more.

Fiction: Google is paid by booksellers like Amazon to include links on Google Books pages.

Fact: We provide links to booksellers on Google Books pages because we want to make it easier for users to buy books and for publishers to sell them. Booksellers don't pay to have their links included in Google Books, and Google does not receive any money if you buy a book from one of these retailers.

Fiction: Google is freeloading off people's books by making money from ads on Google Books pages and not sharing it with the copyright holders.

Fact: Google Books provides tremendous benefit to authors and publishers at significant cost to Google, the opposite of freeloading. We don't place ads on a specific book result unless the copyright holder has given us permission to display portions of the book and wants to show ads. When we do show ads, the majority of the revenue is given back to the copyright holder. In other words, we profit from Google Books ads only to the extent that our publishing partners do as well.