At the risk of angering Dan with yet another article featuring the company that begins with the letter "G," I wanted to let you know about some new comics available on Google Play. Over 400 Dark Horse volumes are available in any country where Play books are available. To sweeten the deal, for a limited time, the first installment of select series are on sale in the U.S. and Canada for $3.99. You may be saying, "So what? Dark Horse comics are on Comixology." True, but some of the titles on Google Play aren't available on Comixology, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer....

Good news for our readers in Mexico. You can now get books through Google Play, in addition to apps. Slashgear kindly reported on it for those of us who can't read Spanish. (It was announced yesterday on Google+ Mexico.) According to Slashgear: Publishing houses offering content for users in Mexico include Random House Mondadori and Planeta, according to a statement made on the Google Mexico G+ profile. In addition to local titles, international titles are also available, providing access to bestselling novels from overseas. The article discussed reading on smartphones and tablets, but didn't mention e-readers, so my first question, having never used...

The Google Books lawsuit proceeds apace. paidContent and CNet report that, in Google’s latest filing, the search giant is appealing the court’s decision to certify class action status for the Authors Guild. Google argues that the majority of writers actually approve of its scanning (58% according to a Google-commissioned survey), and that its scanning to provide search capability is a transformative fair use. Google suggests that even if the court rules it is not fair use in general, it will still have to decide on a case by case basis whether each individual book is or not. Is Google...

PaidContent has a copy of Google’s motion for summary judgment, and a summary of what it says. Google makes the case that its scanning of all those copyrighted books qualifies as fair use, and cites numerous examples of beneficial outcomes that have come out of the availability of that information to be searched. It also insists that inclusion in the search has been beneficial, not harmful, to sales of the books it has scanned, and even well-known literary agencies like William Morris recognize that. The Authors Guild was expected to file its own motion later today, but I haven’t...

On The New Republic, David Bell takes a five-page look at some of the implications e-books have for the future of libraries. In light of the New York Public Library’s ongoing plan to move many of its books away from its main branch into offsite storage with 24-hour advance request required, Bell wonders to what extent libraries really need to keep books around anymore, and what the changing role of the library might mean in years to come. One thing Bell points out is that millions of public-domain book titles are available through the auspices of organizations like Project...

With a $10,000 research prize as well as thousands of periodicals for reading and study, I've very recently found a great resource for librarians, eReaders and classic pulp fiction fans.  With titles ranging from Collier's Weekly to classic works of pulp such as Argosy, Weird Tales, and even Yank magazine, I've been reading for hours. If this sounds interesting to you, then head on over to unz.org, a site I recently stumbled across when doing some research for my history blog.  Brought online by Ron Unz, who has been a huge fan of Wikipedia, there are thousand of resources to look...

Judge Denny Chin has dealt Google a setback today in the Google Books scanning lawsuit, ruling (PDF) against Google’s arguments that the Author’s Guild should not be allowed to stand in for its individual members and that the three individual plaintiffs should be denied class-action status. Google had argued that individual plaintiff participation would be necessary to decide on issues of fair use, but the judge didn’t agree. Google had also argued that the three plaintiffs weren’t sufficiently representative of all classes of book publishing as a whole, but Chin felt books could be considered by category—they didn’t...

PaidContent has a piece by Jeff John Roberts looking at the current status of the Authors Guild vs. Google court case involving Google’s actions in scanning millions of copyrighted e-books. The case is moving slowly forward with new motions presented today, that Judge Chin has promised to rule on later. The Authors Guild wants Chin to okay its request for class-action status to let the US’s writers sue together. Google argues that the Guild doesn’t have standing to sue on authors’ behalf, and the suits should be brought by individual authors who feel they have been wronged—and that the...

The Bookseller reports that Google is about to launch an e-book store in France, as part of its Google Play entertainment portal. The search giant has emailed publisher partners of its Google Livres books search with an offer of a contract amendment that would give Google 48% of the price of e-books sold directly to consumers, as well as an unspecified share of a 52% margin on sales through retailers. 48%, huh? That’s quite a bit more than Apple and Amazon have asked for. I wonder if anyone will kick up a fuss about that. Regardless, this is Google...

Some blogs are making a big deal out of how the recent 200th-birthday Charles Dickens Google Doodle linked, not to a general Google search for its subject as other such doodles have in the past, but rather to the Google Books search for Charles Dickens. CNet’s Chris Matyszczyk (rather smarmily) calls it a “pure, straight-up piece of commercial communication.” You might not see today's Google Books-pointing doodle as a moneymaking effort. After all, these Dickens e-books are free. And yet, surely, the aim is gravitate your mind and habits over to the Google eBookstore, where money...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

Ars Technica has a look at the current filings and legal strategies in the Google Books case. There are three current cases against Google—two 2005 cases involving publishers and authors, which are the ones involved in the settlement that failed after four years of work, and one in 2010 from photographers and illustrators. Google appears close to a separate settlement in the publishers’ case. But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced...