Anyway, this is a controversial project.

For some people:

- It's a violation of the rights of authors and publishers.

- A Risk of monopolization of access to the content of books

- It transfers public cultural heritage to a commercial company

- And scanning has been without enough quality: for them Google has poor images and worst OCR.

For others:

- Was a unique opportunity to democratize knowledge by digitizing the content of millions of books that would have been impossible to do otherwise in a reasonable time.

- Created a free and easy tool that allows you to query the contents of the books and download them for reading.

- The scanning quality is enough. In our case, the digitization with Google improves considerably what other companies have done with our collections.

- Has created public collections of digitized books that never before have been created.

- Stimulated other public and private projects of mass digitization

Anyway the facts are:

First, that participating libraries have created with their digital copies important public collections of scanned books.

And second, when you search Google you find not only websites but books that can be downloaded and the general public use this tool (and how)