Google Books launched in 2004 under what original name?

Google Books launched in 2004 under the original name Google Print. The publisher-facing program was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004, before Google adopted the Google Book Search name and later settled on Google Books.

The project grew from Google’s broader ambition to make the contents of books searchable online. Google scanned books, converted their pages into searchable text using optical character recognition, and displayed different levels of access depending on copyright and permissions. Public-domain works could be available in full, while copyrighted books often showed only snippets or limited previews.

In December 2004, Google announced the Library Project, partnering with institutions including the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library. This initiative expanded Google Print from a publisher program into a large-scale digitization effort involving research-library collections.

Project Gutenberg was an independent digital-library project, not Google’s original name. “Google Library” also describes the idea behind the library digitization initiative but was not the launch name. Google changed the service’s name from Google Print to Google Book Search in November 2005.