Google today announced that it has reached a deal with book publishers to settle two copyright lawsuits over potential copyright violations in its Google Book Search product. This $125 million settlement, which still needs approval from a U.S. district court, will be used to establish a Book Rights Registry that will ensure that publishers and authors receive compensation from subscription services and ad revenue. For users of Google Book Search, this settlement will mean that they might soon be able to build an "online bookshelf" and buy licenses to read the full-text of books in Google's index.This will make Google Book Search even more popular. I can imagine libraries and schools licensing specific content. (I could definitely imagine a virtual bookshelf for specific classes or academic programs.) And getting rid of the snippets is a blessing! They really weren't useful. While 20% of a book is a lot, it means that people can make a better decision about purchasing it or borrowing it from a library.Google will now be able to fade out the 'snippet view' in Google Book Search, which only showed very small amounts of text from a given book. Instead, most books will now allow readers to preview 20% of the book.
Technorati tags:
Google, 
Digitization
No comments:
Post a Comment