The American Booksellers Association sent a letter to its members today announcing that Google was putting an end to its reseller program, which allowed independent bookstores to operate an e-book storefront using Google as the wholesaler. The news was confirmed shortly afterwards by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, saying “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers.” → Read More
Federal Judge Denny Chin ruled against the proposed settlement between Google and written content creators, saying that the proposed $125 million agreement (in discussion since 2009) is over-broad, and takes too many liberties on the part of orphan works and other potentially disputable items. The agreement would have put millions of books, in and out of print, online, but Chin suggested that the nature of the agreement (opt-out rather than opt-in) was too permissive of Google’s “scan first, get permission later” approach, and that it essentially rewarded them for illegal behavior. Seems to me that rewarding illegal behavior is pretty common these days, but we’ll assume that Chin meant well here.
His fear of overstepping his judicial bounds is to be commended, but is he setting back the industry as well? → Read More
Google Books is one of the most straightforward projects in the Google meta-project of cataloguing and indexing every piece of data in the world. The human race has, after all, only been literate for around five or six thousand years, which makes the task measurable, if not easy. The project is also interesting for many other reasons — social, technological, and logistical. The impact of all of the world’s literature being searchable online is incalculable, but the methods being used by Google to accomplish that are a fascinating convergence of legacy and high tech systems. → Read More
The latest twist in the ongoing settlement talks between Google and book authors is that yesterday, the judge in the case denied an attempt by photographers to become part of the settlement. In the decision (embedded below), Judge Denny Chin basically ruled that photographers are not authors, and that the settlement only covers “word-based material,” with the exception of illustrations in children’s books.
The judge writes that the motion was filed too late, and that in any case, the current settlement does not preclude photographers from bringing their own lawsuit. → Read More
Google offered some more details on its upcoming digital book store earlier today at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Google plans on selling downloadable electronic books called Google Editions to any device with a browser.
Today, Google Books gives you the option to buy books you find there from other online retailers. But Google Editions will come directly from Google’s own yet-to-be-launched store. It will make 400,000 to 600,000 books available through agreements with publishers, who will get a cut of each book sold (about 63 percent if it is sold directly through Google, 45 percent if it is sold through an affiliate retailer, which would split the rest with Google similar to the AdSense model). → Read More
<img src="http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/Google-Books.jpg" class="shot2"
It appears that the plaintiffs in the Google Books settlement fiasco are going back to the drawing board by asking to postpone a hearing that was scheduled for October 7.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice made its intentions clear that Google needed to rewrite the settlement that the company made with the Author’s Guild to make orphan books available on the web. The hearing was to take place to hear from the plaintiffs, which include the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and others, as to what needs to be changed in the settlement. → Read More
Always nice for a reporter to bump into a developer who builds mobile applications for startups and gives you a live preview and details of yet-to-be-announced stuff. No worries, he has permission to talk about the apps (he thinks). The man I’m talking about is Julián Moreno from development house Droiders, and he and his team have been hacking away at some fine apps for the Android platform: Kyte, Rummble, TransDroid and an ebook reader for the Google Books database. → Read More
Google is adding a feature to its Google Books service today to allow PDF downloads of out-of-copyright books. For example, to download a pdf version of Dante’s Inferno, see the right sidebar of this page. Until now, Google only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online (and only snippets of copyrighted works). To search the database of available full titles, go to books.google.com and click the “full view books” option when searching. This new move contradicts earlier statements by Google that scans of out-of-copyright books would not be made available for printing. Many full view titles, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, don’t have the PDF option yet. Project Gutenberg is already offering downloads of thousands of out-of-copyright books, although the formating is inconsistent and the interface is less than user friendly. → Read More
Google Books, a program that’s been controversial in the US, has reportedly penned a deal with four publishing houses in China. Rival Baidu has deals with Chinese libraries instead; its program has access to 15 million books, the largest online collection of Chinese books in the world. Working with libraries is the approach Google came under fire for in the US when publishers said their copyrighted materiel was being included in the program without their permission. The search company took an opt-out approach in the US. It’s notable that Windows Live Book Search has an opt-in program for publishers and Google appears to be following its lead when formulating its China strategy. Google Book Search China will give readers acccess to excerpts from books and require payment to read the full works. Though book search has not inspired a whole lot of interest in the US, China’s long literary tradition may make this part of search more important there. I don’t know how things work in China, but it seems that partnering with libraries instead of publishers would be the best way to access thousands of years worth of books. Given all the lawsuits against US companies lately for failing to respect intellectual property in other countries, perhaps Google is taking a safe approach in China. → Read More
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