Google has come to a settlement with French publisher Hachette Livre in regard to the scanning and use of scanned French books for its Google Books project. The deal apparently gives Hachette considerable control over what titles are scanned and used. Hachette will also get to use Google’s scans of its books for print-on-demand and e-book sales. The Bookseller’s FutureBooks reports on the settlement and posts the press release. The Bookseller itself has more backstory, noting that Hachette had filed an objection to the Google Books settlement with the US court in September. Google says that it does not...

The complete panel has been released in four separate videos. The panels include Corey Williams, ALA Washington Office; Jonathan Band, author of many articles about the settlement; Professor James Grimmelmann, Marybeth Peters, Registrar of Copyright; Johanna Shelton, Senior Counsel Google; Mark Sandler, CIC. For links to all the videos see this Resource Shelf article....

David Rothman pointed me to an article in the Wall Street Journal about Openlibrary.org, a new cooperative initiative between the Internet Archive and a number of public and other libraries. They are creating a digital library containing “more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles” that will be available at member libraries. And a couple of libraries are contributing scans of a few hundred older works that are still under copyright—which is what got Google in trouble. For books that are still under copyright, the library will treat a...

This is important stuff and is something that has been at the heart of my objections to the Settlement. From the Open Book Alliance website: Today, the Open Book Alliance released a comprehensive analysis that details how the proposed Google Books Settlement violates international laws and treaties.  A full version of the study can be found here.worldCynthia Arato, partner at the law firm of Macht, Shapiro, Arato and Isseries and a prominent litigator on intellectual property and copyright issues, finds that “numerous provisions of the proposed Google Books settlement would, if approved, violate the treaty obligations of the U.S.  If the settlement is...

Received the following from Dan D'Agostino: ... you might want to look at this interview .... It's the first detailed analysis I've seen of how Google Books would work with academic libraries. The bit about publishers using it to sell ebooks to academic libraries is quite significant, although, as he points out, the current deal wouldn't allow new content. But clearly, for the future, it would be easy to see Google Books as a kind of one stop shop for all academic ebooks. Anyway, just a heads up: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6726978.html?rssid=191 Here's one question from the article: In August 2009, you published...

While many of us are aware of the legal wrangling going on with the Google Books settlement, this doesn't take away from the virtual cornucopia of materials available for your reading device.  Through their mobile version, http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/, or regular ePub/PDF download, there are lots of options to consider.  However, there might be too many options if you don't get your saved resources organized....   What I'm talking about is customizing your Google Books materials for your device via the My Library and Bookshelves options.  Recently reworked and updated, this can prove a great way to customize and sort your saved books by subject, type,...

The New Yorker has a great in-depth piece on the three-way power struggle involving Amazon, Apple, and Google around the “big six” publishers. There may not be much new to people who closely followed the last several months of e-book news, but there is a certain value in seeing all that history together in one place. It makes a good primer for those who might not have been paying that much attention. The article covers publishers’ discomfiture with Amazon’s $9.99 price point, the institution of agency pricing and Amazon’s temper tantrum, and the launch of the iPod and...

The Financial Times (registration required) is reporting that photographers and illustrators are preparing to file a class action copyright infringement suit against Google over the images used in the publications Google has been digitizing. “Google is scanning in books and publications with visual images, which impedes the rights of the copyright holders of those images. We are seeking compensation for that,” said James McGuire, founding partner of the New York office of law firm Mishcon de Reya, who is leading the case. ... Mr McGuire said losses to photographers and illustrators were likely to be “quite substantial” although it was hard...

It may seem odd given that Barnes & Noble is the company that added Google Books to its e-book reader’s on-line store, and given that Amazon and Google are on opposite sides of the Google Books scanning and settlement issue, but apparently the FTC has investigated “close ties between Amazon and Google”. The New York Times “Bits” blog reports, based on unnamed sources, that a venture capitalist John Doerr, who sat on both Amazon’s and Google’s boards of directors, has chosen to resign from Amazon’s board in the wake of an FTC investigation similar to the one that...

About This Series Things Publishers Fear is an occasional series about the realities of publishing in the modern era. For the record, survival is not guaranteed, nor is it always deserved. No 2 ~ Google Where to start with the fear of Google. The 12 million scanned books. Yes that will do for now! It is not just that publishers are rightly pissed at the fact of Google's actions (and the gall they have shown in continuing with them throughout the process of first suing and then reaching a complex and variously hated/despised/grudgingly accepted settlement) they fear the implications of Google's actions. Fearing the fact When...

Steve Jobs was seen attending the Academy Awards last night (his second company Pixar’s movie Up won Best Animated Feature and Best Score), and the first TV commercial for the iPad was screened twice over the course of the show. iBooks was a fairly large part of the commercial’s focus. A decent commercial, though I couldn’t help but notice the clip from Star Trek during part of a montage of screenshots and images was in full-frame and looked rather cramped. Speaking of the iPad, CNet has an iPad FAQ that sums up what is generally known...

Changes: A Vietnamese interface translation has been added. LitRes integration, which was broken in the previous version, has been fixed. HarperCollinsPublishers announced the launch of its Print on Demand (POD) service which will allow Australian and New Zealand readers the chance to purchase individual copies of books that were previously out of print. See the Google Book Monster attack at Book Patrol along with a mind-boggling chart from the Library Copyright Alliance. ...