After previously announcing that one million public domain books were available upon Google Books, the search engine giant has announced another first involving 7 digits.

Google has digitized one million books from member libraries of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC is the consortium of the Big Ten member universities and the University of Chicago.

Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. [...]

While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. (Inside Google Books)

The additional volumes should help Google compete against eBook giants Amazon and (to a lesser extent) Apple’s iBook store, the former which seems to have been a hit with publishers.

Google Books still has a long ways to go before it can catch up to rivals, but if successful it could prove to be a lucrative enterprise for the search giant as well as help them generate some revenue beyond their “one trick pony” (i.e. search).

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