Max Kaiser has published "Putting 600,000 Books Online: the Large-Scale Digitisation Partnership between the Austrian National Library and Google" in the latest issue of LIBER Quarterly. Here's an excerpt: In a public-private partnership with Google, the Austrian National Library is digitising its historical book holdings. Some 600,000 volumes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries will be digitised and made available free of charge. The project demonstrates that public-private partnerships can be successful in enabling our heritage institutions to provide large-scale access to their holdings, provided that such partnerships are not exclusive and free access is ensured. The article outlines the preparatory phase...

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...

From Good E-reader Blog: Google Books officially hit Canada last month and finally allows us to purchase best sellers and millions of free books. This really makes e-readers like the iRiver Story HD relevant because it used to be USA only and now can be used as a viable alternative to many of the other stores out there. The one drawback of the Canadian version of the store is the lack of selection. The American version of Google Books has millions of paid offerings while the Canadian version only has a few thousand. This is set to dramatically increase now that...

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...

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...

From Gigaom: Google is getting into the personalized news-delivery app game with Google Currents, a new product available Thursday for Android and iOS devices. Currents is in the same wheelhouse as Flipboard, which launched its impressive iPhone app earlier this week. Does the search giant moving into this space mean smaller competitors should be worried? The article notes that Google Currents is U.S. only product at this time From the Google Mobile Blog We’ve worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, AllThingsD, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Fast Company and more. Content is optimized for smartphones and...

From the Inside Google Books Blog: Starting today, you’ll also be able to break out the colored highlighters and pens with Google eBooks in the Web Reader. To start adding notes, first open your web browser and find your Google eBooks in yourMy eBooks bookshelf (make sure you are signed into your account at the top right hand corner of your screen). If you don’t have any ebooks yet, you can start your collection with a free classic from Best of the Free bookshelf, or purchase an ebook from oureBookstore. Then, click on the book to open it in the Web Reader. You should be...