A treatise on a stuffed hippopotamus, an 18th-century English primer for Danish sailors and a description of the first engine-driven submarine are among 250,000 books to be made available online in a deal between Google and the British Library.

The agreement, announced Monday, will let Internet users read, search, download and copy thousands of texts published between 1700 and 1870.

It is a small step toward the library's goal of making the bulk of its 14 million books and 1 million periodicals available in digital form by 2020.

"So far we have only been able to digitize quite a small fraction of the global collection," said the library's chief executive, Lynne Brindley. "There is a long way to go."

The deal marks another step in Google's effort to make digital copies of the world's estimated 130 million books. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., touts the ambitious project as a way to enable anyone with an Internet connection to tap in a vast reservoir of knowledge. Google, though, stands to make more money if it can build the world's biggest digital library.

By stockpiling millions of books that can't be easily found elsewhere, Google gives people another reason to use its search engine, which already processes about two out of every three queries on the Web.

Last year, the British Library announced plans to digitize up to 40 million pages of newspapers dating back three-and-a-half centuries, and it recently made thousands of 19th-century books digitized in a deal with Microsoft available as an app for iPhone and iPad devices.

To read the complete article, see:British Library, Google in Deal to Digitize Books Published between 1700 and 1870(www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=48481)

Elsewhere on the web Hugh Pickens writes:

To read the complete article with reader comments, see:The End of Paper Books(news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/20/0158255/The-End-of-Paper-Books)