GOOGLE wants to save you a trip to the library.

The search engine that revolutionised how people use the Internet has teamed up with some of the world's greatest libraries to put their books in your living room.

At the same time, the non-profit Internet Archive said libraries from five countries, including China and India, had agreed to add one million digitised books to its archive, with about 70,000 expected to be online by next April.

"There will be a reshaping of how book access is done through both the commercial and library systems," Internet Archives founder Brewster Kahle said.

"Isn't it fantastic? Having this much access is just fantastic for everybody."

Google said yesterday it planned to scan millions of books from Oxford University, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library to make them available through its search engine.

Google director of project management Susan Wojcicki declined to say how much the project would cost and how long it would take.

Nonprofit archiving efforts like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive have been placing public-domain materials online for years. Yahoo, Microsoft, and other commercial search engines have joined the effort.

Google will post links to locations where the books can be found in the real world.

A Google search for Of Mice and Men, for instance, turns up several pages from the Penguin Group's edition of John Steinbeck's classic novel, along with links to online booksellers.

Wojcicki said users would also be directed to libraries near them that carried the book.

Copyright laws prevent most recently published books from being posted in their entirety. So libraries will prioritise older books that are in public domain.

Wojcicki said Oxford University, for example, would first digitise books published before 1900.