The ever-expanding Google search engine has opened a new Finnish-language localisation of its "Google Books" service.
The idea is that Google scans and stores books in its online digital database, and searches can be made on the texts therein. The results come out either as entire texts or as samples - depending on the state of the authors’ rights for the work concerned.
A search within a book is made possible by the company’s text-recognition software.
An example of the Finnish works to be found from Google Books in Finnish is the 2nd edition of the national epic poem Kalevala from 1849.
In the case of something like Täällä pohjantähden alla (Under the North Star), Väinö Linna’s seminal trilogy from 1959-1962, only excerpts are available.
The archiving of works in Finnish is still in its infancy.
Google has been collecting material in English since the service opened in 2005 from sources such as the libraries of Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford universities, working at a prolific rate of tens of thousands of volumes per week.
Google also offers publishers a partnership programme that serves as a kind of marketing channel for books. New books are not published on the search engine on a free-access basis.
Google also makes agreements with libraries for the digital transfer of their entire collections.
There has been a certain amount of litigation afoot as a result of the material coming out of libraries, as publishers have in some cases felt that their copyright has been violated.
