Google Book Search

Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book - famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth - found in the world's libraries, as part of the company's core mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Beginning in 2002 as a "secret books project," according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search has become a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws.

Google started in 2004 to partner with many of the greatest library collections in the world -- the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, among others -- to digitize their collections, paying the scanning costs. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

In October 2008, Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers to end a class-action lawsuit that challenged the legality of the scanning project. Under the agreement, Google will pay $125 million and create the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The $125 million will go to compensate authors and publishers whose books are still under copyright and help find the copyright holders for so-called "orphan works," out-of-print books that are still within the law. These copyright holders, who are considered part of the group, or class, that settled with Google, are hard to find, since many never expected their works ever to be in print again. It is the resurrection of these works -- making them available at the click of a mouse -- that many consider among the greatest benefits of Google Book Search. That, and the millions of public domain works that will be easily searched and called up by computer users around world.

The proposed settlement has attracted opposition from various corners of the book world, and the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation.

A coalition has also formed to oppose the proposed class-action settlement, which is awaiting court approval. Tentatively called the Open Book Alliance, it includes nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations. The coalition is led by Gary L. Reback, an antitrust lawyer in Silicon Valley, and the Internet Archive, a non-profit group that has been critical of the settlement. The group plans to make a case to the Justice Department that the arrangement is anticompetitive. Members of the alliance will likely file objections in court independently.

In August 2009, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans to join the Open Book Alliance.

"This deal has enormous, far-reaching anticompetitive consequences that people are just beginning to wake up to," said Mr. Reback, a lawyer with Carr & Ferrell, in Palo Alto, Calif. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback helped persuade the Justice Department to file its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft.

European publishers, authors and copyright holders have also objected to the proposed settlement in the American courts. On Sept. 7, 2009, representatives of those groups spoke out at a hearing sponsored by the European Commission against the proposed deal. They said it would give Google too much power, including exclusive rights to sell out-of-print works that remain under copyright, a category that includes millions of books.

Google has tried to mollify European opponents by clarifying that a digitized version of a book considered out of print in the United States, but still commercially available in Europe, would not be sold online without explicit consent from the European copyright holder. The company has also offered European publishers representation on a board to oversee a "book rights registry," which will distribute royalties from digital book sales under the plan proposed by the settlement.

New York Times  Sept. 8, 2009