Google Wants Your Book

Posted on October 7, 2004

Amazon.com and Google are now rivals in the book search business. USA Today reports that Google is taking on Amazon.com with its new book indexing service. Amazon offers similar technology on its site where users can search inside books. Amazon also recently launched a rival search engine, A9.

Authors send their books to Google, which chooses which part of the book to scan and make available online. The book pages will feature ads for products related to the book's content. Google will keep the revenue from the ads; there is no charge to have the book indexed. No word yet what the Google agreement looks like, what copyright protections are offered or what recourse authors might have if they object to the type of ads displayed on their book pages.