Google Books

About Google Books
• Overview
• Thoughts & Opinions
• General Help

Partner Programme
• For Publishers & Authors
• Join Now
• Partner Help

Library Project
• Overview
• Library Partners
• Librarian Help

Thoughts & Opinions

Marco Ghezzi, Managing Director of Apogeo
"Google Books was like a technology and a marketing partner," says Ghezzi. "Technology in that it does what we couldn't do by searching inside the book. Marketing in that we can now reach new readers."

Paul Manning, Vice President, Book Sales for Springer
"Google Books is one of the easiest and best online marketing vehicles"

Dr. Matthias Wahls, Brill's Business Development Manager
"Digitising our entire backlist titles with Google has helped to bring our prestigious catalogue of academic titles onto the desktops of our target audiences. This initiative will continue to benefit our academic authors by disseminating information about their works to colleagues and beyond to the widest possible audience."

Eduardo Mirón, CEO of RIALP
"This is a fantastic – and free – marketing tool, and ensures that the company's books get the greatest amount of visibility possible"

Michel Valensi, Founder of Editions de l'Eclat
To the question "What book would you take to a desert island?" I would like to be able to answer: Google Books... because within the immense sea of information available online, Google Books is an island on which one is allowed to take a deep breath. With Google Books, one can get back to books, to their authors, to publishers who publish them, to the bookstores that sell them, to the library that lends them. This is both a step back and a leap forward into the future!

Michelin Travel Guides, Christian Delhaye, Worldwide Vice President
Michelin is making its travel guides available to as many people as possible. Thanks to Google Books, it has almost 300 travel guides in 4 languages (French, English, Spanish and Italian) that will be online in parallel with the print versions. For Michelin travel guides, Google Books makes the search and purchase experiences easier, both at a bookstore and online.

Chomsky, robots and flowers top Google book list - Richard Lea, Guardian - October 5, 2006
"Google has offered the first glimpse at the results of their controversial Book Search project, releasing the top 10 most-viewed texts in English for one week in September. The list is topped by a study of tropical flowers, and also includes a 1934 translation of the Qur'an, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, and a handbook for building an all-terrain robot. With no relation to any bestseller list past or present, the list offers an intriguing snapshot of what users were searching for in the week beginning September 17 2006…Dr Kim Zwollo, global rights director for the German publishing house Axel Springer Verlag, said that since they had joined the programme ‘thousands of people’ had looked at their titles, and that they had ‘seen a 10% rise’ in backlist sales. ."

Google does book-reading a huge favour - Times columnist
"Google may have just done for book-reading what e-mail has done for letter-writing. Yesterday the internet search engine started making classic, out-of-copyright books available to download and print free. The service makes available to everyone the dusty pages of old tomes that once were reserved only for those with privileged access to the likes of the Bodleian library in Oxford and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google likes to boast that its mission is to organise the world's information, but it is doing something better than that: it is is democratising it...Google's service will be a boon to researchers and students. It will enable people to browse bits of books and, it must be hoped, cultivate more interest in reading. For the publishing industry, it will ultimately foster demand. And, in the process, it will reinforce one of the more extraordinary features of the "lean forward" technology that is the internet, namely that it is generally not dumbing us down but lifting us up."

To scan or not to scan? - Guardian Culture Vulture blog - March 8, 2006
"There are already signs in America that Google Books is leading to a strong rise in demand for out-of-print books. I would be amazed if the same did not happen to books in copyright."

Publishers Discuss Google Books Project at LBF - The Bookseller - March 7, 2006
"Publishers involved in Google Books are reporting increased backlist sales and significant marketing opportunities. 'The high rate of 'buy this book' clicks is translating into small sales for our deep backlist,' said [Blackwell's] book sales director Ed Crutchley. A 1999 Blackwell's title, Metaphysics: An Anthology, has had 2,583 page views and 597 'buy this book' click-throughs since it became part of the program. Without any other marketing, the title has had 'its best year in the U.S. since publication.'"

U Mich Pres to AAP: Google is Good - Rachel Deahl, Publishers Weekly - August 2, 2006
"Calling Google's project a 'legal, ethical and noble endeavor that will transform our society,' [University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman] said one of the most pressing issues is that of conservation and restoration. Noting that, as a country, 'we are at risk of losing millions and millions of items that constitute our heritage and our culture,' Coleman said Google's plans will help meet the very dire and immediate need to both preserve and disseminate scholarly and historical texts."

In Microsoft vs. Google, search is true prize - Reuters, Raissa Kasolowsky
In Microsoft vs. Google, search is true prize - "Something you class as useless may not be something that somebody else may class as useless," Hanley said.

The biggest library ever built - Ben MacIntyre, The Times - November 16, 2007
"Today I can select any one of hundreds of thousands of digitised books from the Bodleian, including some of its rarest treasures, and read them on a computer screen. I can do this when the library is closed. I can do it without authorisation. I can do it from Antarctica, so long as I have an internet link. Over the past four years, in partnership with Google, the Bodleian and a number of other great libraries have gradually been transferring their holdings into digital, searchable form."