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...

The ReDigi lawsuit took an intriguing turn yesterday. Google sent a letter to the judge in the EMI v. ReDigi case asking permission to file an amicus brief. Google says that it is not taking sides in the case, but some points of law that will be considered could set important precedents for the future of the cloud hosting industry. Google brings up the Cablevision case that legalized remote-operated DVRs, and the Sony v. Universal case that legalized VCRs and explicitly called “time-shifting” fair use, But the really interesting part is this argument: The final...

CNet has an article about Google’s stripped-down Chromebook laptops, and their placement in schools. In a speech at the Florida Educational Technology Converence yesterday, Rajen Sheth, Google’s leader of Chromebook work for business and education, announced that hundreds of schools across 41 states have outfitted at least one classroom with Chromebooks. Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical...

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...

Google has just added offline reading to its Google Books app for the Chrome web browser. They tout this as offering the ability to read e-books on a plane, or when the Internet has gone down for some reason. To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks. Of course, it only takes...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

It’s nothing new for libraries to check out e-books to their patrons, and some of them even check out e-book reading devices. But the Palo Alto City Library is going to go one better: it’s going to check out Chromebooks. The library started carrying 21 Chromebooks last month, and they’re available for in-library use. Starting next month, patrons will be able to sign up to take them home for one week. The idea is apparently to show people how awesome the Chromebook is and make them want to buy one themselves. Google has been having a hard time...

Google is not the only party in the Google Books lawsuits who is attempting to move forward with litigation. Publishers Weekly reports that the Authors Guild is filing to request class certification in its lawsuit against Google Books. The guild argues the class should be approved because individual claimants “could not as a practical matter effectively assert alone against Google” such claims of infringement, and that “those claims are presented far more fairly and efficiently than they would be in individual actions, which would require the same issues to be litigated multiple times.” ...

Here is another movie-related story (or a continuation of the same story) about YouTube rights abuses, with implications for all electronic forms of physical media (including e-books). In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about Universal’s allegedly fraudulent takedown of a Megaupload promotional video, Torrentfreak reports Megaupload has instructed its legal team to file suit against Universal over the matter. (One of my friends noted that, if Universal really did do what Megaupload accuses, it should also be liable for criminal charges of perjury.) It will be interesting to see what happens. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the...

Apparently Google has gotten fed up over the failure of the settlement talks in the copyright lawsuits over Google Books, because it has begun to move toward actually litigating the case. An article in TechWorld notes Google has notified Judge Denny Chin that it plans to file a motion to ask that parts of the 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit and a related 2010 lawsuit be dismissed. [Judge Chin] set a deadline of Dec. 23 for Google to file the dismissal motions. The plaintiffs will have until Jan. 23 to respond to the motions, and Google...

This past week, Google launched its new Flipboard-alike Currents app, but Flipboard hasn’t been standing still either. The company launched a scaled-down version of its iPad reader app for the iPhone. (Alas, it requires at least OS 4.0, so it won’t run on my first-generation iPod Touch—not that I’m really surprised.) The app proved to be so popular that the added demand took down Flipboard’s servers for a while after its release. (Something similar happened after the original iPad app was released.) I suspect Flipboard may not have too much to worry about from Currents just yet. Meanwhile, cloud...

About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership. More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience. Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than...