All those books around me, they are incredible treasures.

How many different works from how many different times

in history, that gives you a sense of awe.

I'm Scott Dennis, and I'm librarian for philosophy

at the University of Michigan.

History of Ecuador.

This is acid paper from the 1880s.

This is getting very brittle, and this will eventually

turn to dust.

We were in danger of literally losing

every copy of some of these books from the 19th century.

Google went through all of this.

I can walk through here now, and we

know that it's been preserved.

DIVYA MOULI: Sort of the real power of Google Books

is that it's intended to be really easy to use

for any kind of person.

They can just go on Google Books, search for a phrase

or search for a word, and a whole world

is opened up to them about that topic.

Our mission statement as a whole company

is to organize the world's information

and make it universally accessible and useful.

Having the power to search this huge collection of books

from all across the world for this very specific information

that you're looking for is pretty invaluable.

ADAM METZGER: My name is Adam, and I'm one

of the members of the band AJR.

And while we've been on tour, I have stayed in school,

and I'm working on my PhD in international human rights law.

Plenty of room.

Google Books is a very big part of the solution.

It's saved my back from carrying so many books around.

The fact that I can organize my entire bookshelf in one

place really easily, it allows me to move much,

much faster creating a body of work on a certain topic.

LISA LISSON: My favorite part of research and genealogy

is finding the answers.

It's like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle.

And you get that last piece in, and it's like, aha.

I love discovering the stories of ancestors,

whether they're my ancestors or whether they're

someone else's ancestors.

Google Books gives me access to records and information

I would not necessarily be able to get.

City directories-- you can find a lot of city directories

on Google Books, and those can tell so much about an ancestor.

Having access to Google Books saves me time,

it saves me money, but it also opens up ideas

that I never knew.

SCOTT DENNIS: Google Books really has democratized access.

It's the power to bring all these vast resources

and literally make them available to everyone,

everywhere.

Google Books goes on to change people's lives

and affect the world.

That's pretty profound.