Larry Page, the founder of Google,
was particularly interested in
'digitizing every book.'

In 2002, Google signed a contract
with the University of Michigan
to scan and digitize all the books in
the university’s library.

They then expanded to other
prestigious universities like
Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

BOOK FROM HARVARD

FROM STANFORD

FROM OXFORD

Google developed a book scanner
that could scan around 1,000 pages
per hour without damaging the books.

Dozens of software engineers were
assigned to this project to correct
distortions at the edges of the pages
and ensure accurate text recognition.

Over the course of several years,
Google successfully digitized and
created a database of 25 million books.

However, the Authors Guild and
the U.S. publishing industry sued
Google on the grounds of
copyright infringement.

the Authors Guild

Google

But Google did not
intend to sell the scanned books

but planned to make only
portions or indexes searchable.

They planned to sell out-of-print
books and share the profits with
authors and publishers, which
opened the possibility of a
settlement in the lawsuit.

Publishers

Authors

However, MS, the competitor in the
search industry and Amazon, the
one in digital book, objected to the
settlement, saying that it's monopoly.

As a result, the 25 million book
database at Google became
inaccessible to anyone, even within
Google, except for very specific data
management purposes.

By the way, the data is said to be
around 50-60 petabytes 
(1PB = 1,048,576GB)