After seven years of litigation, Google and book publishers said on Thursday that they had reached a settlement to allow publishers to choose whether Google digitizes their books and journals, reports Claire Cain Miller in Friday?s New York Times.
It was a small step forward for Google?s plan to digitize every book and make them readable and searchable online, known as the Google Library Project, but it did not resolve the much bigger issue standing in Google?s way ? litigation between Google and authors.
Though the settlement will not change much about the way that Google and publishers already partner, it is the newest signpost for defining copyright in the Internet age. It is also the latest evidence of the shift to e-books from print, and of Google?s efforts to compete with e-book rivals like Amazon.com. Digital books were a new and daunting prospect when the publishers first sued Google seven years ago, but they have now become commonplace.
The publishers involved in the settlement are the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, the Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. The deal allows the publishers to choose whether to allow Google to digitize their out-of-print books that are still under copyright protection. If Google does so, it will?allow people to read 20 percent of the books online and purchase the entire books from the Google Play store. It will share revenue with the publishers, but the precise financial terms were not disclosed.
Google has been offering publishers the opportunity to sell digital books for years, and digitizing new books has become routine for publishers. But under the settlement, publishers get the benefit of Google digitizing out-of-print books that they might not otherwise have turned into e-books. Meanwhile, Google can expand the library of e-books it sells to consumers.
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