booksahead.com

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is recruiting authors for a class action intervention in the Google Book Settlement, because the titles offered by Google under the agreement have no protections for the privacy of readers. This is a pressing concern, one the consequences of which were demonstrated by the recent Amazon Orwell debacle, which I discussed [...]

I’ll be listening in when Publishers Weekly’s Jim Milliot, AAP board members Richard Sarnoff (Bertelsmann) and John Sargeant (MacMillan), and the Authors Guild talk turkey about the Google Books Settlement on July 29 at 2 PM Eastern time. The conference call will be held online, you can sign up here.

The U.S. Department of Justice will investigate the Google/Authors Guild/Association of American Publishers book settlement to determine if it violates federal antitrust laws. I suspect that the result will be a compromise that allows future negotiations of royalties by rights holders (authors and publishers) with Google. The current agreement, which rights holders must decide to [...]

Roy Blout Jr., president of the Authors Guild, has published a plea for support of the Google Books agreement he helped negotiate, arguing that the deal is being held up over fears about a “‘Monopoly’ of Orphans.” He argues that Google’s monopoly on scanned out-of-print books would be only over those books for which the [...]

The Financial Times‘ Lex column (registration at site required, but free) makes the rhetorical point:
Imagine that in the 19th century the company furthest advanced laying US railroads was given the right to build all future rail lines. The public might have gained from the new services, but ultimately been left at the whim of a [...]