As proposed at the Frankfurt, Germany, book fair, the initiative will make available electronic learning tools, book clubs, children's books, and information on reading projects through blogs, video clips, and networking sites.

"Literacy changes lives. The new Google literacy site is a brilliant opportunity for literacy organizations around the world to share imaginative ideas and research about what really works," said Julia Strong, deputy director of the UK's National Literacy Trust, in a statement. "Together we can help to get the whole world reading, writing, and communicating."

Collective Effort

Visitors to the site (google.com/literacy) can find and search within books about literacy or track down literacy-related research papers from academic publishers, universities, and other organizations. Video clips provide an inside look at what literacy organizations and educators around the world are doing to promote the ability to read.

Google already is well underway with its controversial Print Library project, scanning and digitization books from the collections of libraries at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library, among other institutions.

The lofty goal is to create a searchable index of all of that content and offer it at no charge on the Web, although authors and publishers have complained about copyright protections. The Open Content Alliance, a similar digital library project backed by Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard , Adobe, and the Internet Archive, uses only books in the public domain.

On a Mission

Google also is conducting a $3 million pilot project with the Library of Congress. Over time, the company will integrate a massive amount of Library of Congress content into its search index.

These efforts are an extension of Google's mission to provide access to as much information as possible and to help users find it easily. While altruistic, the efforts could boost Google's online profile and draw more people to the company's other services.

For the literacy initiative, Google is joining forces LitCam, a literacy campaign launched by publishers at the Frankfurt gathering, and the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning.