Library's gateway for the HathiTrust Digital Library

The nearly 10 million digitized books in Hathi Trust are now searchable via DiscoverE. About 2.7 million of these are in the public domain and their full text is available online. 

To find Hathi Trust materials, enter a search text under the combined search tab of the discoverE home page, and, if your search terms match any items indexed by Hathi Trust, Hathi Trust will appear as an option under the Collection category on the left side of the search result page. Click on the link to see only Hathi Trust results, and you will have the additional option to filter the results to show only those whose full text is available to you.

How is Hathi Trust different from Google Books?  Here are some answers from www.hathitrust.org...

New items being digitized: HathiTrust’s corpus overlaps significantly with Google’s, but the overlap will likely decrease over time as Google and HathiTrust partners independently add content to their repositories not digitized through the Google Books Library Project.

Focus on preservation: While Google’s goal in its digitization is in keeping with its mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” HathiTrust focuses on preservation, with access as a significant part of its preservation strategy  and broader mission to provide a public good available to anyone in the world.

More in public domain: HathiTrust and Google Books have different methods of displaying search results for works protected by copyright, and HathiTrust asserts rights under US copyright law that Google has not, for example by full access to works produced by the US federal government and allowing users with print disabilities who sign out a print copy of a book to receive full text access as well. Staff at the University of Michigan conduct review of US works published between 1923 and 1964 to see if they really qualify for copyright protection, and HathiTrust makes available certain works by agreement with rightsholders.

Integration with catalog: An added advantage of HathiTrust over Google Books is its integration with library catalogs, making it possible for users to locate particular issues of serials and take advantage of subject headings and other catalog metadata, which are often not displayed correctly in Google Books.