Google does Shakespeare

In support of New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park event, Google Books has created a nice landing page aggregating the complete works of the author. What better use could there be for Google Booksearch? What could better improve the PR of the controversial opt-out system for in-copyright books that Google has set up? To be fair, its search results won’t display the full text of books unless they are out of copyright. [For clarification on this, see the comment below from Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch.]

The forthcoming Windows Live Booksearch announced last week a partnership with the Universities of California and Toronto and that program will take an opt-in approach to indexing copyrighted works, meaning that most rights holders will have to submit the works before they are included in the Live.com database.

These two big players will be competing soon for all your book-searching needs. Expect Google to come up with more themed offerings and simple, elegant project pages.