Open Content Alliance, an unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities has announced an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

Members include Yahoo, the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

In a departure from Google’s approach, the Open Content Alliance will also make the books accessible to any search engine, including Google’s. And by focusing at first on works that are in the public domain — such as thousands of volumes of early American fiction — the group is sidestepping the tricky question of copyright violation.