IN a storage facility at the University of Michigan, some 2.5m books are undergoing the first steps in what promises to be the biggest revolution for the written word since the invention of the printing press.

The university is producing digital copies of the works to make them searchable in the same way that people now look at the internet for information.Over six years, the university aims to make digital copies of all 7m volumes in its library.

According to associate provost James Hilton, who is overseeing the project, it would have taken roughly 1,000 years to copy all the books had the university relied on its own resources and technology. But Michigan is being aided by Google, the search-engine colossus, whose avowed intention is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

To date, Google has concentrated on the virtual world of web pages to provide online information. Now it has signed up with some of the world’s great libraries to add the printed word to its digital universe.

Alongside Michigan, Google is working with Harvard, the New York Public Library, Oxford’s Bodleian library and Stanford University.

Not everyone is happy. The project has sparked the biggest challenge to date to Google’s ambition to be the gateway to all human knowledge.

The Authors Guild, whose board includes Michael Crichton and Barbara Taylor Bradford, has launched a legal action against Google. The guild accuses Google of “massive copyright infringement”. It is seeking damages and an injunction to halt the project in what looks set to be an increasingly bitter public battle for control of the written word.

Google has also angered the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which argues that the internet firm is riding roughshod over copyright law — charges Google says are ill-founded.

Under pressure, Google has stopped digitising books that are still under copyright and has set a November 1 deadline to reach agreement with authors and publishers. With three weeks to go, neither side seems close to agreement or backing down.

Nick Taylor, Authors Guild president, said: “This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law. It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Relations were not always so strained. Last October, Google launched the Print Publisher Programme. Under this scheme, Google forged deals with leading American and British publishers to allow it to scan titles they submit and display digital images of selected pages in response to search queries. Publishers get a cut of revenues from accompanying ads. But many titles that Google wanted to scan were not being submitted by publishers, and others were out of print. So Google approached some of the world’s top libraries with the idea of digitising their collections.

The company gave publishers the chance to opt out of the scheme. But instead of telling Google which titles they can use, the onus was put on publishers to say which titles they did not want scanned.

“If Google can do this, so can anyone else,” said AAP vice-president Alan Adler. “How would Google respond if someone used its patents without permission?” Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, said its use of copyright material was well within the terms of “fair use”, which allows companies to use portions of copyright text, in much the same way as a book reviewer might quote from a book he is reviewing.