Online book network to be built by German publishers

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Publishers in Germany have announced that they are to create their own online book repository in an attempt to defend their copyrights from companies such as Google with its Google Print project.

As part of the Google project, which involves five libraries, the Internet company is digitalising books to make them searchable at http://print.google.com. Publishers and authors are, however, extremely critical of the idea due to copyright issues.

A three-month pause in the scanning of copyrighted books for the Google Print Library project was previously announced by Google in August this year.

According to Reuters, the German association of book publishers is planning to build a network by next year that will allow the full texts of their books to be searched online by search engines but will not hand the texts over to companies such as Google. In addition the association plans to create its own search engine and provide consumers with the opportunity to borrow books over the Internet.