Searching Books at Google?

With Amazon's launch of a searchable databases of the full-text of over 120,000 books, it comes as no surprise that Google is also in talks with publishers to do something similar. Publishers Weekly reports that Google has been in talks with publishers and that Google "has reached agreements that allow it to enter as many as 60,000 titles in its database and also presented extensive mock-ups to publishers of how book-relevant searches will look."

On top of talking to publishers, Google is also working with OCLC to include a subset of OCLC's WorldCat database of library holdings in regular Google results. According to an Information Today NewsBreak, these results could start appearing at Google in November. This is part of the Open WorldCat Project.

How Google will implement either initiative, if at all, will be interesting to see. If none of the other search engines do something similar, then Google will have a unique component to its database with library holdings records and/or full-text search access of books.