This week, Google announced its foray into digitizing books. Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, stated, "Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online. Today we're pleased to announce this program to digitize the collections of these amazing libraries so that every Google user can search them instantly.” With the announcement, Page has probably gleaned a fan or two in those librarians “who lovingly organize” but -- more significantly -- the company has yet again managed to have the masses, including the media, swan over this newly-launched Google-digitizing effort.

Google has agreements with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oxford as well as The New York Public Library to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them via Google.

With the initiative being called everything from ambitious to mission-critical, as Mary Sue Coleman, president of Univ. of Michigan noted, "We believe passionately that such universal access to the world's printed treasures is mission-critical for today's great public university.”

Google is maintaining its crown as King of Search Survivor Island, as well as Page and co-founder Sergey Brin keeping their titles as those two nice, sweet young men whose selfless goal is to help the world help itself to Google.

But, before we all stand in the library halls, holding our texts out waiting for Google to come digitize them, let’s turn to a company called Questia, which has been successfully digitizing both public domain and copyrighted content for years now as well as establishing strategic cooperatives between publishers and itself.

Click here to see the story of the founding of Questia, authored by Troy Williams, founder, president and CEO.

Questia was launched Jan. 2001 by Troy Williams, a driven young Harvard graduate who saw grave disparity in library access for students and ventured to change that. Based in Houston, Questia works with over 250 commercial and scholary publishers, and has amassed over 50,000 books, 390,000 journal, magazine and newspaper articles online with subscribers from 190 countries. Just this month, Questia is adding 2,000 books to its digitized library -- 1,000 from Oxford University Press and 1,000 from Cambridge University Press.

Questia is the first online library that provides 24/7 access to the world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles.

Users of Questia can, for a mere $20 a month, search each and every word of all of the books and journal articles in the collection. To complement the library, Questia offers a range of search, note-taking, and writing tools including a tool that allows for customization of the book, including color highlighting and writing notes in margins as if it was an actual book.

My own personal favorite feature is the tool that creates footnotes and bibliographies within your paper, as well as having the capability to hyperlink. (This alone could have boosted my GPA in university days significantly.)

Questia’s founder is quick to give a nod to Google. In regard to Google’s initiative, Williams said, “We don’t see the Google initiative as competition; it’s great to hear that more efforts are being made to get more works under public domain online. Every child deserves access to a library online. What’s great about this initiative is that, from the sounds of it, Google is providing as much content for free as they can. The end user can have the public domain works free online or a portion of it or the copyrighted content for $20.00 a month with us, or a combination of both.” (Note: Public domain works are creative works not protected by copyright, so they may be accessed and used by anyone. Public domain works in the U.S. are defined as anything published prior to 1923.)

While the Google initiative will most assuredly further the ability of users worldwide to search and find expansive public domain content online, let’s keep in mind that all hype being equal, Questia has successfully established the largest online library to date and it’s still adding “digital” to its shelves at a fantastic rate.