The stated reason was that the Open Content Alliance changed their representative at the last minute from a professor to a lawyer. Google did not want to put an engineer up against a lawyer, and it was too late to find a Google lawyer to take the engineer’s place.

Naturally, each side is claiming the other’s behavior is ridiculous.

Related: An unpopular view of Google Books, by Downes.

Disclosure/reminder: I own a speck of Google stock as a long-term retirement investment, though you’d never know it from some of the posts I’ve done on the proposed Google Books settlement.

It was always hard to see what had been processed but now they have put up a series of pages showing just what’s available. Their Blog talks a bit about it.

The cast of participants stood out—for example, Dan Clancy of Google, Carrie Russell of the American Library Association, Pam Samuelson, Paul Duguid and Mary Murrell of the University of California, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and TeleRead contributor Michael Cairns of Information Media Partners. The conference was expensive, however.

But now you can watch the conference sessions—including the tutorials—for free on the Conference website.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

He makes the points that books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a black hole and that the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone but academics. Sergy goes on to point out how dangerous library book storage is, with normal deterioration and fires, floods and other disasters continually destroying them.

He says that, under the settlement, the majority of revenue will flow back to the rights holders and that participation is in no way compulsory. Further, rights holders can set pricing and access rights to their works, or even withdraw them, at any time.

He feels that if the settlement is successful others will follow and it will serve as a plan or precedent for orphan works legislation.

I think a number of his arguments are specious, but it is an important statement of Google’s intentions and should be read in full by anyone interested in the settlement.

Usenet contains the history of the internet and the rise of technology and Google acquired it in 2001. It morphed the Usenet archive into Google Groups and then combined the archive with Marc Spencer’s own archive of millions of posts. The two archives comprise 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups. I remember when this all took place and the excitement of all of us who had been a part of Usenet.

The problem, according to the article, is that the archive is broken. It is almost impossible to do a search, says Poulsen, in the Google Groups archive unless you have a direct link. It seems that Google has sort of lost interest in the archive and is making no efforts to revamp the search function, perhaps because there is no economic incentive to do so. Thus, the archive remains extant, but mostly useless.

The concluding sentence of the article is worth reading, as a caution to the hype that is surrounding the Google book settlement: In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

Just the other day, a novel of mine benefited this way.

How? Well, I offer a free audio of several chapters of The Solomon Scandals—a reading that Tom Peters, a librarian, kindly made in his spare time for a blind friend of ours. Yep. Many would say that still more of the book should be on the open Web in MP3, and it might happen in the future.

But meanwhile a busy professor in a history-related discipline has already emailed me to inquire if the entire novel is available to him in audio. The professor is considering Scandals for as an assignment in his course, and he wants to audition the full book while commuting.

Luckily I was in a position to oblige him with the other audios, and I’m thinking ahead. What if my publisher let me make free MP3s available to the students the professor assigned Scandals? They, too, might like to enjoy Scandals during commutes, or maybe jogs or treadmill sessions, if the professor goes ahead. Why should I force them to buy the book twice, in different formats?

The limits of ‘free’

Mind you, I don’t see “free” as a panacea for the whole book industry. As e-book displays improve, will free downloads really be that great at promoting paper editions? What about writers like me who are relying in part on revenue from e-book versions, which, in Scandals’ case, happens to be the main show right now despite the existence of a trade paperback?

I suppose some would say, “Well, the paid version in E just can include extras that the free version doesn’t?” But I don’t know if that’ll work for every title even if I know “free” and “paid” can often co-exist. So I’m still in favor of keeping the option of outright sales of the full e-book in file format (nondownloadable Google displays could be a different issue).

Given the challenges that tiny publishers face with large chains, it may be too damn hard to buy Scandals and other small-press in person, and Net-based bookstores can go only so far, whether the medium is E or P. At least with E, you can enjoy your purchase almost immediately. See why I’m so protective of E sales?

Freebie successes via Google

But that’s just one situation. What about the book samples that Google is putting online with authorization from publishers? Here’s an excerpt from a Boston Globe story by assistant business editor D.C. Denison, a TeleRead reader and WiFi booster:

The majority of publishers in the program allow Google to preview 20 percent of each book. Google monitors Internet traffic patterns to prevent users from logging in multiple times and cobbling together the entire contents of a book.

Google also provides links to the publisher’s online bookstore, if there is one, and a half dozen other online retailers, like Amazon.com.

Partner publishers get weekly reports from Google detailing the number of times that a book’s content is viewed. For many publishers, these “book views’’ have been rising steadily since May 2007, when book search results were added to the standard Google.com search results.

Langevin said that Galbraith’s “The Great Crash 1929’’ generated “zero’’ views for July and August 2008. In September 2008, as the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused the US economy to start teetering, book views rose to 628. By October, the views rocketed to 22,897, as Internet users started searching for words and concepts that were well represented in the book, although the number of views did subside later.

Image: CC-licensed photo from Padraic.

French group La Martinière has become the first publisher worldwide to sue Google in court, demanding €15m (£13.8m) in damages for copyrighted books digitised by the search engine without permission.

The publisher is also seeking a penalty of €100,000 per day, and €3m for prejudice to its image. The trial opened in France on 24th September and a ruling is expected by 18th December at the latest.

La Martinière, which is backed by French publishers association Syndicat National de l’Edition (SNE) and the French Writers Union, Syndicat des Gens de Lettres, (SGDL) estimates that the search engine has illegally digitised between 6,000 and 9,000 of its titles.

While looking at Google Book Search the other day I was intrigued to discover that parts of my early oeuvre, such as it is, have been digitized from the University of Michigan collections.

I was particularly struck by the word clouds. Here is a word cloud from a 1991 work on libraries and networks with special reference to the now long forgotten OSI suite of protocols.

On CNet, Don Reisinger looks at websites that allow book reading on-line. As might be expected, he looks at quite a few sites but barely even scratches the surface.

The sites Reisinger covers are the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Books, AskSam, Bartleby, Google Books, Great Books and Classics, Perseus Digital Library, and of course Project Gutenberg. He does not mention Feedbooks, Manybooks, Scribd, or any of the countless others that are out there. But then, there are so many such sites that no article could list more than a small number.

The sites he does cover are decent enough for reading books on-line. But the fact that the article’s focus is on reading on-line makes it flawed, in my opinion. Almost nobody is going to want to read books on-line, from a computer screen. Downloading them to a hand-held device makes them much easier to read.

For all that, Reisinger does have a decent list of sites, and a good explanation of what makes each one great. If on-line book reading is your thing, there are some good resources here.

I only downloaded one book from Google Books this year, and it included more than a half dozen such image errors which I’m going to call “finger spam.” Google has come to dominate the competitive business of Internet search in large part because of their ability to fight spam. If they are going to be successful making scanned books available on demand, they’re going to need to start fighting finger spam as well. My suggestion is that the Google Books department appoints Matt Cutts their new editor-in-chief.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Google Book Search, Paul Biba, publishing, self-publishing, TeleRead

If you look at the drop down list on the Google page you will see that they have added a “Books” search option to the “more” listing. This certainly will make life a bit easier for book people. The picture is a bit small, but it’s the second one down on the list.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Paul Biba, TeleRead, Google Book Search

… Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.) …

On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)

Technorati Tags:
Paul Biba, publishing, TeleRead, Print on demand

“I would like to hear from the critics a better solution to the problem as opposed to criticisms of the solution that we arrived at after four years of negotiation,” [Schmidt] said. “I read this stuff, and it strikes me that people who only criticize have as their interest the current status quo.”

CNet claims that Bloomberg reports that Google, a group of the lawsuit plaintiffs, and the Justice Department are now in talks concerning possible modifications to the settlement. However, the Bloomberg story (which has been amended three times as of this writing) currently shows nothing of the sort.

Google has already amended the settlement to institute a privacy policy and to state that books in print in Europe will be considered to be in print by Google Books too. But these changes have done little to quell the growing discontent.

I wonder what, if anything, Google can do to address the complaints. No matter what they do, they will not please everyone. As it is right now, the vocal opponents clearly seem to outnumber the vocal supporters.

ReCAPTCHA has already been used for some pretty large digitization projects, such as the scanning of the entire New York Times archives. It makes sense that the company doing the largest digitization project of all would recognize its usefulness in their efforts. Given how error-ridden Google Books’s plain-text versions have been so far, something like this is really badly needed.

Who knows? Next time you verify your humanity with a ReCAPTCHA, you might just be digitizing a tiny piece of a Google Book.