In late 2004, in pursuit of its modest goal to "organize the world's knowledge" (and to monetize organized access to it) Google announced a program of digitizing books. The program evolved into two parallel projects: The partner program, with publishers covering inprint works, and the Library Project, covering out-of-print (but in-copyright) and public domain works. The latter program involved scanning and indexing the vast number of books owned by several major libraries, providing a searching tool for them and then displaying fuller texts of public domain works, or "snippets" of protected works.

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