July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, added its first Japanese university to a project that will make millions of books available online.

At least 120,000 books from Keio University's libraries will be included, Mountain View, California-based Google said today in an e-mailed statement.

Keio, whose main campus is in Tokyo, is the 26th library to join Google's book search program. The company started the project in 2004 to enable users to search inside books, seeing pages as they originally appeared with graphics.

Last month, 12 U.S. colleges including the University of Chicago and Ohio State University joined the project. Harvard University and Stanford University are also participating.

Publishers have sued Google, saying the company is breaking copyright law. Google says it complies with the ``fair use'' provision of the law by showing snippets of copyrighted works and only making publications in the public domain available in their entirety.

Google said the books scanned from Keio University will be public domain, meaning that they aren't under copyright.

Shares of Google rose 78 cents to $543.34 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock market. They have gained 18 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 10, 2007 18:35 EDT