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Posted onGigaOm
By Mathew Ingram on October 08, 2012It’s possible there was some cheering at Google (GOOG) last week, when the search giant announced a deal with the Association of American Publishers over its book-scanning project. But it’s more likely there was just an overwhelming sense of relief, since the deal amounts to a truce in what has been a grueling seven-year battle. For almost a decade now, Google has been trying to scan and digitize as many books as it can, but it’s been stymied by lawsuits from the AAP and the Authors Guild, who claim the scanning process amounts to copyright infringement.
Although the Guild says it is still steadfastly opposed to a deal, the agreement with the AAP means that Google might finally be able to move forward with its plan, which stands to make searching for and buying books a lot easier—something that would theoretically benefit just about everyone, with the possible exception of Amazon.com (AMZN).
A lot about the latest agreement is still unknown: Neither side is saying much about the details, including whether Google will be able to scan books without having a prior deal in place with the owner of the rights, and what will happen with respect to the contentious topic of “orphan works”—books whose publisher and/or author cannot be found. Both of these aspects, among others, were what helped to torpedo an earlier settlement agreement Google had made with the publishers’ organization and the Guild, which was eventually struck down last year. That deal also involved the payment of $125 million by the search company, but the latest arrangement has no financial terms associated with it, or at least not any that have been made public.
It’s hard to remember now, but when Google first announced in 2004 that it planned to scan and digitize the world’s books (a project formerly known as Google Books, before the search giant started actually selling books, that then became known as Google Print and finally the Google Library Project), it sounded like another one of the company’s awe-inspiring and somewhat futuristic attempts to create a better world—along the lines of robot cars and Google Street View. Google even had partnerships with some of the world’s most famous universities, including Harvard, which provided access to the scool’s massive archives of historical texts and journals (although Harvard has since shelved its partnership and instead put its efforts into the Digital Public Library of America project).
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A lot about the latest agreement is still unknown: Neither side is saying much about the details, including whether Google will be able to scan books without having a prior deal in place with the owner of the rights, and what will happen with respect to the contentious topic of “orphan works”—books whose publisher and/or author cannot be found. Both of these aspects, among others, were what helped to torpedo an earlier settlement agreement Google had made with the publishers’ organization and the Guild, which was eventually struck down last year. That deal also involved the payment of $125 million by the search company, but the latest arrangement has no financial terms associated with it, or at least not any that have been made public.
It’s hard to remember now, but when Google first announced in 2004 that it planned to scan and digitize the world’s books (a project formerly known as Google Books, before the search giant started actually selling books, that then became known as Google Print and finally the Google Library Project), it sounded like another one of the company’s awe-inspiring and somewhat futuristic attempts to create a better world—along the lines of robot cars and Google Street View. Google even had partnerships with some of the world’s most famous universities, including Harvard, which provided access to the scool’s massive archives of historical texts and journals (although Harvard has since shelved its partnership and instead put its efforts into the Digital Public Library of America project).
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