Tom McCluskey

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Well, this is some interesting news: Google and the Author’s Guild have settled their dispute over author’s rights and the digitizing of massive collections. Or at least, there is a proposed settlement that’s still pending a judge’s review. But it’s sounding pretty definite.

For those not in the loop, the issue here is that Google was working with Stanford University, the University of California and the University of Michigan, to digitize their entire collections. Google would then make these selections available through their Book search program.  The selections are not generally complete, though if the copyright holder consents Google will display the entire work. On some of the books I browsed through, there were notes indicating ommitted pages (“Pages 12-14 are not part of this preview”), and other books would let you browse through the entire work, but only for a certain number of pages; The Two Towers stopped about 300 pages in, with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum just taking leave of Faramir. So most of the books was there, but not all of it. Books in the public domain are viewable in their entirety, and are downloadable as PDF files. More after the break . . . .

When Google first came forward with this system, there was a huge outcry from authors and publishers, despite the limits Google placed on book-browsing (which were a bit more severe for a while; according to an article on Bloomberg today, “Searches in the Google Book program currently generate about three or four lines of text from a work”, which certainly didn’t match up with what I found moments ago). It was feared that putting all these books online for free would have a huge negative impact on sales, as well as being a violation of copyright on a massive scale. So a class-action suit was brought against Google by the Author’s Guild.

The proposed settlement is in the neighborhood of $125 million. Some of that money will be going to authors and publishers whose works have been scanned without permission (so if yours have, get in touch with Google–according to the Washington Post, there’s at least sixty bucks in it for you). That will take about $45 million, while another $34.5 million will go to setting up a program that will compensate rights holders. According to the settlement web page, this program “will, among other things, locate authors, publishers and other Rightsholders and distribute to Rightsholders the revenues from Google’s uses.” These revenues will include 63% of what Google makes from selling the books or placing ads next to the books.

My big question here is if Google is considering moving these files from .pdf format to something more ebook-friendly, like .epub. It would certainly be a huge boost to the ebook marketplace, and would have that accessibility I mentioned recently. That being said, it would be a phenomenal amount of work to convert all those files to XML and then to whatever ebook format they decided on. If ebook popularity keeps growing, though, this could be a great way for Google to get into the market. I can’t help noticing, too, that their terms are almost twice what Amazon offers on their Kindle store. . . .

So that’s the news and my analysis, for the moment. If you want to read more, there are plenty of articles out there, and if you’re a bit more masochistic than I am you can take a look at the 323 page Motion of Preliminary Settlement Approval.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.