Taking aim at Amazon.com, Google introduced a feature Wednesday that lets users search through pages of books online. The site invites publishers to include their entire books in its index, and more than a dozen publishers have signed up.
Google Print will search books according to key words and return a handful of titles at the top of the results. Though Google will scan the entire text of the books, the new feature won't let people read entire books online. Publishers choose how much of the text is made available for users to browse through.
Google profits by adding its contextually targeted advertising on the book pages.
Among the publishing companies signed up are Penguin, Houghton Mifflin, Blackwell and Oxford University Press.
