Wednesday, May 20, 2009
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- Google has been making progress with its Google Book Search project, having scanned and indexed 7 million volumes, but it will vastly expand if a settlement with authors and publishers is approved by a U.S. Federal court in Manhattan.
The settlement decision is expected sometime in Q4 of this year. The agreement covers authors with who hold copyrights in the United States. If the settlement is approved, Google will expand the project globally.
Books_sm2 We sat down with Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker who explained the process and what the approval will mean for users of Google and authors of "orphan" books which are out of print but still have copyright protection.
While amount of money for authors in the settlement is just $60 per title, there will be other fees in the form of sharing in e-commerce, search and advertising.
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch wrote about the pending settlement and payment to authors back in February.
There have been some high profile objections to the settlement, including Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder, who wrote an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post titled "Book Grab." His article is getting quite a lot attention including this piece on the WSJ.com
So just how does Google scan all those books? The company declined to provide a demonstration to Beet.TV. Stephen Shankland at CNET News.com wrote a post a couple weeks back which reveals the process as demonstrated in diagrams filed by Google for a patent.
Follows is an automated, unedited transcript of the interview with Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker.

At Google we have this program product called book search. And we have scanned and indexed over seven million books. Because sometimes the answers people are looking for can be found inside of those pages. -- the product exists today and it's very popular and people love it.
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