Google is planning to continue its digitizing of all the books in the world and make them searchable on their databases. They have come under fire due to copyright infringement, but the project is going to move ahead with books, which are out of print and old literary works.

Many authors are concerned that they will inadvertently violate their copyrights and put their books online too. In fact there have been a few boo boos which started the ball rolling on lawsuits; one by Penguin books and one class action lawsuit by the authors. Google continues to remain focused on the project wishing to collect all those books already in the public domain.

Google is planning on spending over 200-million on the project and will work with the New York Public Library and several top colleges and Universities such as Stanford and Harvard and Oxford in the UK. The project could take until 2015 to complete, but they are moving forward on it. Google indicated that 80% of the out of print books being scanned for placement into their data bases were very hard to get a hold of for the public.

Microsoft and Yahoo also are working on a similar project and have some heavy hitters helping them. There are many Universities with very workable systems, which they will model these off of. Bill Gates himself is quite interested in this, as if you will recall one of his earliest projects was the Encarta digital encyclopedia.

All in all, this is very good news for mankind, however many authors feel as if they will have some ruffled feathers before it is all over. Indeed that may be so, although only time will tell. Maybe Gates micro payments idea on emails and later on the Internet could have solved this problem and unfortunate eventuality before this issue had appeared? Perhaps it may remain all free in the future.

This is a fascinating evolution and one to keep an eye on, as it has the workings of something very good for all concerned. Think on this.