You know, I never really understood what exactly Google was doing with the Google Print (Beta) project. I’ll admit I had never tried it out before today, and the only thing I really knew about it was that Google planned to scan a number of books and display them online.

My misunderstanding, which is probably shared with many other people, was that Google planned to show the entire book. i.e. A online library, where you didn’t have to “check out a book”.

Well after reading this post on the Google Blog, I realize I misunderstood the entire project. I’m betting a lot of other people are like me.

It’s not Google’s intent to display the entire book form cover to cover. Rather only excerpts from the books. For example, if you were to search for “Demon Soul” you would get a list of results of books that contained that phrase. Now, I was after the Warcraft related book, and the first result listed, War of the Ancients, Book Two: The Demon Soul. Clicking More results from this book you see that in the results returned we can see a number of pages where “Demon Soul” appears in the book. Page 3, 5, 7, 22, 27, and others. You don’t get to see every page of the book.

Another interesting thing that happened while using this was after clicking on about 5 pages or so, I received an error that stated I had reached my viewing limit for this book. Now for this book I was lucky, as it allowed me to see full pages, however the help page explains that in some situations, users may only see a partial excerpt from the book.

I admit, I didn’t fully understand this project until I looked into it more. I think the Authors Guild which is suing Google over this probably doesn’t understand it either. With the limitations Google has put into place, as well as the ability for authors to “opt out” of the program, I see absolutely nothing wrong with it.