Let us not forget: 98 percent of all books ever written can not be bought, anywhere, because they are permanently out of print. And for most of these, you won’t even find the rightsholders.

What the settlement proposes is that these lost books can be scanned, digitized and put online, as long as no rightsholder object. And if the rightsholder is still around, and does not object, then he or she is entitled to 2/3 of the proceeds. Which is really a lot; an ordinary publisher will give you something like 15% of the profit it makes.

In my eyes, the Google book settlement is great. It means we can carry most of the human knowledge ever printed into the digital age, despite the screaming resistance of booksellers worrying about their business models.