Scanning world's every book means turning many, many pages

Through Book Search, users can track down a book on any topic they're interested in and read a small portion. If the book's not protected by copyright, users can download the whole thing. If it is, or if they just want to read an original, they can use Book Search to find copies to buy or borrow.

More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan partnership since it began in 2004, with an estimated 6 million to go.

Book Search has the support of many publishers, authors and librarians, including Cambridge University Press and Wisdom Publications. But some publishers and authors have sued, claiming the service violates their copyrights. Google says Book Search is aboveboard because Web surfers can retrieve only snippets of copyright material through the service.

Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive at the Open Content Alliance, said Google may be trying to "lock up the public domain" by making proprietary copies of works whose copyrights have expired which includes the vast majority of the world's books.

Kahle said there's a core value in the project, in preserving material indefinitely and enabling broad access to it. But he questioned whether Google will share the works it digitizes with other search engines.

"We believe there should be many libraries, many publishers, many search engines, many types of users from different points of view," Kahle said.

John Price Wilkin, Michigan's associate university librarian, called Kahle's stance "theoretical."

"Our volumes are entirely open in the sense that people can find them, read them, use them, do all the things that they would do in scholarship or pleasure," Wilkin said.

In the room where Mitchel and colleague Chava Israel, an artist, work, the temperature is always in the 60s.

Each technician has a slightly angled table with a flexible middle that cradles books and holds them still while two overhead cameras photograph the pages. Sometimes the women play music or listen to news online, but they often work in silence, save the clicks of their computers and scanners.