Google to Publish Old Books Online

Google issued a press release today stating it is getting into the book publishing business. Specifically old books:

As part of its effort to make offline information searchable online, Google Inc. today announced that it is working with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google.

No mention was made on what types of books, whether fiction, or non-fiction, historical, genealogy, scientific, or what. My sense it will probably be anything and everything. Users will be able to search the text of these books, and be able to read the books from the scanned images.

As it stands now in the genealogy world, there are perhaps thousands of volunteer groups who transcribe old out-of-copyright history and genealogy books and publish them online. Ancestry.com has its "Family & Local Histories" project, which was originally started by Genealogy.com, where they have scanned and indexed more than 20,000 old genealogy and history books. It sounds like Google's new entry into this foray will be a boon to family history researchers.