Google Book Search

The Wall Street Journal offers some confirmation of the schedule for Google Editions:

Google Inc. plans to begin selling digital books in late June or July, a company official said Tuesday, throwing the search giant into a battle that already involves Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc.

Google has been discussing its vision for distributing books online for several years and for months has been evangelizing about its new service, called Google Editions. The company is hoping to distinguish Google Editions in the marketplace by allowing users to access books from a broad range of websites using an array of devices, unlike rivals that are focused on proprietary devices and software.

Kindle came out of the gates strong, Apple's eye-candy and design aesthetics has transformed the market with the iPad, but Google Editions is the real wildcard in my opinion...with the potential to revolutionise how books are purchased and accessed.

Google's controversial book deal looks to be meeting more and more resistance, with news that the U.S. Justice Department is making inquiries into concerns that it would give Google a monopoly over orphan works:

Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, which also digitises books, said his organisation had "multiple conversations" with the Justice Department about the Google plan.

"There are legitimate antitrust issues related to Google's ability to solely commercialize this content," Brantley said, adding he hoped the settlement agreement would be rejected by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin.

"We would like the court to say: 'This is fine theoretically, but these orphan books, they don't have anyone to speak for them, so let's take them out of the agreement,'" he said.

In further news, the deadline for authors/publishers to opt-out of the deal has been extended by four months. The original deadline was May 5th.

Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece about the Google Book Search settlement over at Boing Boing:

Writing on O'Reilly Radar, preeminent legal scholar Pamela Samuelson cuts through the distractions associated with the Google Book Search/Authors Guild settlement and goes right to the heart of the matter: Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

...By design or by accident, Google got the most reactionary elements in publishing to anoint Google the Eternal God-Emperor of Literature. Thanks a lot, Authors Guild -- with friends like you, who needs piracy?

Some good insights in there that are worth contemplating.

Google has settled its copyright dispute with the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers for $US125 million. The settlement in the case - which challenged Google's Book Search program - will "establish an independent, non-profit Book Rights Registry, to resolve outstanding claims by authors and publishers and to cover legal fees from class-action lawsuits against Google." More crucially, it also sets the scene for the publishing industry to enter the 21st century, with royalties from digital viewing of books:

The agreement, which only applies to holders of US copyrights, allows users of Google Book Search to preview a limited number of pages of in copyright books for free if the rightsholder agrees. Consumers can choose to buy an entire book online at a price to be set by the rightsholder or a Google algorithm designed to "maximise revenues for the book".

Google's Book Search program is now offering a very handy free database for publishers - one which lists books for which the copyright was not renewed between 1923 and 1963 (thus putting them in the public domain):

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain...The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.

The Guardian has a long and fascinating opinion piece by author John Lanchester on copyright in the Google Age. Lanchester surveys the history of copyright, the influence of corporations in modern copyright law, and how Google Booksearch is changing how we think about ownership of book content:

The corporations have the power, and they are not afraid to use it. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US considerably extended the range of both criminal and civil offences that could be committed over copyright issues. There is a clause in US film contracts which awards the producers rights "in perpetuity and throughout the universe and for any and all forms of expression whether now existing or hereafter devised". As far as I can tell, the only loophole in that is if you fell through a crack in the space-time fabric of the universe into a parallel one...

...There is an irony here. Twenty years ago, the US studios announced that the end of civilisation as we know it was at hand; the destructive force was the video-cassette recorder. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, went before Congress and said that "The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone." Today, revenue from video rentals accounts for 46.6% of all the money earned by the major studios.

In mid-January Google hosted "Unbound" at the New York Public Library, which featured a number of high-profile speakers on the cutting edge of publishing, all who were basically aligned (though not completely) with Google's efforts to change the face of book publishing.

At "Unbound," the tech-savvy authors, publishers and analysts more or less agreed that to grow and profit in an increasingly digital world, the publishing industry will have to expand its boundaries.

"We're in a period of tremendous change, and have to embrace that change," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of technical manual publishing company O'Reilly Media. "We as publishers have to become part of the new digital ecosystem that Google is working so hard to build."

Part of the focus of the event was to help convince publishers to ink deals with Google on their 'Book Search' program, which has been under fire from many publishers for infringing on author (and publisher) copyrights.