A day after Google was forced to changed the name of its e-mail service after legal action from a small British financial firm, the search engine company is facing another challenge in the courts.

The Association of American Publishers is seeking an injunction to stop work on the Google Print Library Project, which involves indexing millions of copyrighted books from three major American university libraries and making them available on the internet.

The lawsuit, which seeks recovery of legal costs but no additional damages, cites the "continuing, irreparable and imminent harm publishers are suffering ... due to Google’s wilful [copyright] infringement to further its own commercial purposes." It was filed in the US District Court in New York on behalf of five publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.

Google called the legal action "short-sighted" and said the project was an "historic effort to make millions of books easier for people to find and buy."

David Drummond, Google’s general counsel and vice-president of corporate development, denied that the company is infringing copyright. "Creating an easy-to-use index of books is fair use under copyright law and supports the purpose of copyright: to increase the awareness and sales of books directly benefiting copyright holders," he said.

"This is not a matter of copying material and putting it online," Mr Drummond said. "It’s the equivalent of an electronic card catalogue. Our objective is to help publishers and authors."

Under a deal negotiated by Google and the publishing industry, copyright holders have until November 1 to notify the search engine if they do not want works to appear on the internet in full. In these cases, the site will display a short sample of the work and a link to the online bookshop Amazon.com, where users will be able to buy a hard copy.

Publishers and authors have said it should not be the responsibility of copyright holders to let Google know that they wish their rights to be respected. They would prefer a system in which publishers told Google which books they would allow to appear online and such that all others would be out of bounds by default.

Today’s legal action follows a similar move last month by the Authors Guild, an American group representing writers including Michael Crichton and Barbara Taylor Bradford, which sued the internet company in an attempt to halt the project and recover damages.

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