Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search and Google Print) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. Google's Library Project, also now known as Google Book Search, was announced in December 2004.

Results from Google Books show up in both Google Web Search and the dedicated Google Books site (books.google.com). Up to three results from the Google Books index may be displayed, if relevant, above other search results in Google Web Search.

A click on a result from Google Books opens an interface in which the user may view pages from the book, if out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. Books in the public domain are available in "full view" and free for download. For in-print books where permission has been granted, the number of viewable pages is limited to a "preview" set by a variety of access restrictions and security measures, some based on user-tracking. For books where permission for a "preview" has been refused, only permission for "snippets" (two to three lines of text) may be permitted, but the full text of the book is searchable on this limited basis. Where the owner of a book cannot be identified, a "snippet" view may be implemented. For other books that have neither a "full view", nor "preview", nor a "snippet" view, the text is not searchable at all, and Google Books provides no identification of content beyond the book title. For this reason, Google-Books searches are an unreliable indicator of the prevalence of specific usages or terms, because many authoritative works fall into the unsearchable category.

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Russian-American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the most profitable Internet companies. As of 2012^[update], his personal wealth is estimated to be $18.7 billion. Together, Brin and Page own about 16 percent of the company's stake.

Brin immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin's data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in a rented garage.