Google announced the introduction of the service at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the industry's most important annual meeting, where publishers, authors and their agents convene to buy and sell the rights to publish books in countries worldwide.

The new service would allow users of Google's main search engine to search simultaneously billions of Web pages and the texts of hundreds of thousands of books for information on a given subject. They search works by looking for words or phrases in the scanned digital images of the pages of books that publishers have provided to Google.