books.google.com is a collection of millions of books, all scanned and put online for anyone to look up and read, all for free. The majority of the collection consists of books that are in the public domain, so those that either have no copyrights or whose copyrights have ended, but Google has also made some agreements with publishers to provide others types of books for free. Google books works directly with many colleges/universities, such as Harvard and Stanford, using their collections to add to Google Books. They received lawsuits from individuals claiming copyright infringement, the biggest coming in 2008. It ended with Google agreeing to pay a total of $125 million to rights holders of books and to create a Books Rights Registry.
To cover the cost of some non-public domain books, Google Books might charge a fee for some books, but most numbers show that the odds of Google Books making money is slim. Sergai Brin, co-founder of Google, said that they never expected to make any money from Google Books.
I think this is a wonderful thing, with a really great potential. I personally love to read, and most of the things I read are religious, mythology, philosophy, and history, and much of those texts have fallen into the public domain. Also, although I learned it a little late, my Differential Equations textbook, which cost me almost $200, is on Google Books for free. I think that if Google continues to get agreements with publishers of textbooks, it could really help to offset the cost of college by making the textbooks free for anyone to view.
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