Google reaches agreement with publishers for Book Search

When Google started its Google Book Search Service a few years ago, it annoyed a number of people. Those people included “the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a handful of authors and publishers.” On Tuesday the groups involved reached an agreement, and have submitted it to the court.

The agreement would see Google paying $125 million, but allow them to add millions of books both in- and out-of-print. Of course, most people won’t be able to read entire copyrighted texts before actually buying them, but they will be able to see a few pages of the book.

Important to note is that while most people won’t be able to view them for free from their own computers, public libraries and universities will be able to subscribe to the service. By subscribing, the libraries allow patrons to view whole texts on the computer, while being able to print out pages. Universities that subscribe will open the catalog to their students. There are other services like it for institutions, but none carry the name of Google, or the ease of use of Google Book Search, at least not in personal experience.

The settlement still has to be approved by the court, which it hopefully will. Authors and publishers will have to agree to have their work on the service. Seeing as they were able to reach the agreement, at least a few publishers will probably agree.

It might just be a dream of a college student, but it would be nice if textbook publishers and authors agreed to have most of their textbooks on the service, and give students access to them through the universities’ subscriptions. Authors and publishers get paid, and students assumingly wouldn’t pay much more than a slight tuition increase (depending on the price of the subscriptions).

This sounds like a fairly reasonable idea (assuming the tuition hike isn’t too much) for free access and possibly PDF versions of textbooks. Personally, I know I would have no more need for anything other than a laptop and maybe one notebook for all classes.

Read [Reuters]
Read [Google]