Background on Google Books deal

Google is finalizing a settlement of differences with authors and publishers over Google Books. What is that settlement all about? And what’s the relevance for you?

Let’s start out with a brief history. It all started in 1996, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to work on a project to make the Stanford university digital library searchable. Their project lead to the development of BackRub, a citation analysis algorithm. This algorithm later provided a basis for the PageRank algorithm that became the basis for Google.

In 2002, Larry Page and a small Google team initiated a project involving the digitization of large collections of books. Scanning techniques were explored and optimized for large scale, non-destructive scanning of old and out-of-print publications. The focus remains on university libraries.

Two year’s later, Google reaches initial agreements regarding the online publication of book collections of fifteen well-known publishing companies. US-based educational publishers dominate the list.

2006. Google extends their searchable book database with a button to download-as-PDF out-of-copyright books in Google’s library. More publishers and university libraries sign on to the initiative.

2007. Publishers and authors sue Google because Google has scanned copyrighted books and displayed parts of those books online without prior permission.

2009. Now, after two years of negotiating, a settlement has been reached. The highlights are as follows:

• Google will pay US$45 million to the publishers and authors of which it has (partially) displayed books online without prior permission.
• Google will provide US$ 35 million in funding for setup of a Registry organization that will oversee online book publication rights<./li>
• Google can scan, publish and sell out-of-print books unless the publisher or author requests otherwise.
• Google will pay 63% of its book revenues to publishers and authors.
• Google does not obtain rights to books that are in-print.
• Google’s rights are non-exclusive; other companies can enter into similar agreements with publishers and authors.

Note: full access to the out-of-print books will probably not be free as with the out-of-copyright books that Google is publishing without restraint. Google is doing good work but not for free. A pricing scheme, other than a revenue split, has not yet been published.

So why is this a landmark deal? If the settlement is approved by the court, the world will soon have access to millions of out-of-print books, that are currently very hard or impossible to obtain. Better availability of information is the result. The settlement can be considered ground-breaking; until now, no one had succeeded in unlocking the vast amount of information that is contained in out-of-print books worldwide. Google has made a significant first step.