#Google reader books for free
#Google reader books full

Many devils are buried in the details of the 300-pages of legalese, and much will turn on how the agreement is implemented. Siva Vaidhyanathan offers a differing view: 'These claims are not convincing when one considers just how great an alternative system could be, if everyone would just mount a long-term, global campaign for it rather than settle for the quick fix.').Ĭonclusions beyond those two are harder to draw.

As University of Michigan head librarian Paul Courant points out, those are years that we would never get back. Litigating all of those fair use questions could easily have taken a decade or more. More importantly, a victory would only have given the green light for scanning in order to index and provide snippets in search results it would not have provided clear answers for all the other activities addressed in the settlement, such as providing display access for out-of-print books, allowing nondisplay research on the corpus, and providing access for libraries. A complete victory for Google in this case was probably years away. In contrast, only Google gets to rely on this settlement agreement, and the agreement embodies many concessions that a fair user shouldn't have to make.īut the settlement has one distinct advantage over a litigation victory: it's much, much faster. A legal ruling that scanning books to provide indexing and search is a fair use would have benefited the public by setting a precedent on which everyone could rely, thus limiting publishers' control over the activities of future book scanners. Second, this outcome is plainly second-best from the point of view of those who believe Google would have won the fair use question at the heart of the case. The upshot: Google users will have an unprecedented ability to search (for free) and access (for a fee) books that formerly lived only in university libraries. In-print books will be available for access only if rightsholders affirmatively opt in.

#Google reader books full

Unless authors specifically opt out, books that are out-of-print but still copyrighted will be available for 'preview' (a few pages) for free, and for full access for a fee. But the agreement goes beyond Google's Book Search by permitting access, as well.

#Google reader books for free

In addition to search, scanned public domain books will be available for free PDF download (as they are today). This agreement will allow Google to get close to its original goal of including all of those books into Google's search results (publishers got some concessions, however, for in-print books). Google has already scanned more than 7 million books, and plans to scan millions more.

We are still digesting the ~300-page proposed settlement agreement (for those seeking a good overview, the 39-page notice to class members is a good place to start).įirst, this agreement is likely to change forever the way that we find and browse for books, particularly out-of-print books. Generally, opinions are split between excitement for users ('better access to zillions of out-of-print books') and suspicion of Google ('one library to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them'). Although the settlement must still be approved by the court and is unlikely to go into effect until sometime late in 2009, commentary has already been flooding the blogosphere.

James Grimmelmann's analysis of the settlement.Īs we reported earlier this week, Google has settled the lawsuit brought in 2005 by authors and book publishers regarding its massive book scanning and indexing project. Anyone who owns a copyright and has questions about the settlement should start there. 2009): The official class notice has now been published.

2009): If you are an author, head over to our Google Books page.