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By Chris Meadows

The deadline to opt out of the Google Books settlement falls on this coming Friday. Expect to see a large number of articles about Google Books in the news (such as the piece Paul Biba posted earlier today) as the week draws toward a close.

Here are a few I’ve seen over the past couple of days:

The Guardian has a very good, fairly well-balanced summary of what Google has done so far in its Google Books project and what the issues are. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, or just not paying much attention, this piece will get you up to speed.

CNet has a couple of pieces. One uses a stumper question Google’s Dan Clancy was asked at a Q&A session to introduce a shorter summary of the Google Books settlement controversy. Something this one points out that the other one misses is the synergistic value of having all that knowledge together in one place:

Amazing gains could be made in fields like linguistics. In dismissing arguments that scale makes a search engine better, Google’s Hal Varian told me last month that one area that does seem to increasingly benefit from scale is translation: the more copies of bilingual books that Google has access to, the more it can perfect its translation algorithm.

Another CNet article is Tom Krazit’s “author’s guide” to the issues surrounding the settlement. Presented in a Frequently-Asked Questions style, this guide runs down the important things to know if you are an author whose books might have been scanned—how to opt out, why you might want to stay in, and so on.

Paidcontent.org notes that not everyone in Europe has been objecting to the Google Books/Authors Guild settlement. European Commissioner Viviane Redding has had a number of good things to say about Google:

She said in a speech last month: “I do understand the fears of many publishers and libraries facing the market power of Google. But I also share the frustrations of many Internet companies which would like to offer interesting business models in this field, but cannot do so because of the fragmented regulatory system in Europe.”

The current phase of the controversy comes to a close on Friday. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

 
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