Webware

BERKELEY, Calif.--Google's Dan Clancy had patiently answered question after question regarding Google's' Book Search settlement with publishers and authors until late in the afternoon Friday, when he was finally left speechless.

Louis Trager, a reporter from Washington Internet Daily, asked Clancy what kind of message was sent when Google decided to "copy first and answer questions later." The question--for which there's no safe answer, if you're in Clancy's shoes--perhaps underscored the core of the opposition to the settlement, reached in October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission.

Google's Dan Clancy is charged with defending Google's position before opponents of its book search settlement.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

If the class action settlement is approved, Google stands to gain control of a priceless asset. Jason Schultz, acting director of UC Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic, called it "the largest copyright-licensing deal in U.S. history:" the right to display the contents of out-of-print books that are still covered by copyright protection.

Google, however, has already scanned more than 10 million books. At the moment, it's not allowed to display more than a few snippets of copyright-protected books for which it doesn't have an explicit agreement with the rights holders. If the settlement is approved, Google will suddenly flip a switch and offer full-text searches of those books, as well as links to bookstores.

Nothing vexes Google's opponents more than the fact that the company assumed that it had the right to digitize nearly 100 years of written material without serious negotiations with those rights holders until it was sued. Authors have until Friday to decide if they want to opt out of the settlement and preserve the right to sue Google on their own for digitizing their book without their permission, though they can tell Google to remove their books from the Book Search archive, even if they remain in the class.

Everyone agrees that a searchable digital library of out-of-print books would be a very valuable asset for the world. As any owner of an e-book reader such as Amazon.com's Kindle will tell you, the way we think about books is changing.

Think about it: libraries offer tons of out-of-print books, so it's not like the collective knowledge of those books is inaccessible. Yet that knowledge exists in millions of hard-bound individual silos.

What if we could make all that knowledge instantly accessible from anywhere in the world? And more importantly, what if researchers have the ability to analyze it?

Amazing gains could be made in fields like linguistics. In dismissing arguments that scale makes a search engine better, Google's Hal Varian told me last month that one area that does seem to increasingly benefit from scale is translation: the more copies of bilingual books that Google has access to, the more it can perfect its translation algorithm.

"The value of the book as data is greater than value of the book itself," said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive and perhaps the most vocal critic of the settlement. And who will control access to a valuable group of books? A for-profit corporation, which, by the way, paid just $125 million for the license to that information. It paid $1.65 billion for YouTube.

Google likes to say that anyone can cut deals with the Book Rights Registry, the nonprofit organization set up after the settlement to handle payments to right holders, to get similar access to out-of-print yet in-copyright books. The thing is, the number of organizations that can afford to duplicate Google's efforts is limited.

Clancy declined to say how much Google has spent on scanning books, but the Internet Archive spends about $30 for each book scanned. If Google's costs are similar, that's $300 million and counting; there are about 23 million books in the WorldCat database. Microsoft folded its book-scanning project, once it realized that Google was aggressively going after that market, said Tom Leonard, the head librarian at UC Berkeley, which had been part of a book-scanning partnership with Microsoft.

This is what frustrates Google, to a certain extent: everyone agrees that digital access to books is important, yet no one else is willing or capable of doing it. And Google insists that it will be a fair steward of the material: the European Commission has backed Google's efforts, and several university libraries, such as that of the University of Michigan, are also fully on board.

But taking Google at its word requires trust, and trust in corporations is in short supply at this point in American history. It's taken perhaps longer than it should have, but Google is gradually realizing that a fair portion of the public no longer sees it as a cute little Silicon Valley start-up with idealistic stars in its eyes, one that insists "you can make money without doing evil."

Google damaged that trust when it began scanning books without permission, arguing that it was allowed to do so under fair-use laws. Publishers and author groups also harmed that trust when they turned over the key to the castle by bringing the lawsuit as a class action, suddenly making plaintiffs out of millions of authors who did not necessarily appreciate the future value of digital books in 2005, nor authorize the negotiation of the rights to their works.

By the time the reporter caught Clancy off guard, he was understandably drained from a long day spent under hot lights fielding questions, and at least one diatribe, from passionate academics and activists.

The thing is, it's a fair question: Google has the financial resources and collective intelligence to do nearly anything it wants in the world. Where will Google turn its information vacuum next? Will it ask permission first?

Corrected August 30, 10 p.m. with the correct identification of the reporter who posed the question to Clancy.

A new objection to Google's Book Search settlement with books rights holders plans to argue that the parties to the settlement are "trying to ram this through so that millions of copyright holders will have no idea that this is happening."

Google's plan to digitize books on a grand scale has its fair share of detractors, and Scott Gant will soon join them in opposition to the settlement according to The New York Times. Gant, a lawyer with Boies Schiller & Flexner, says he's acting on his own as an author concerned about the use of class action status to lump all authors into the same pool.

Several groups acting on behalf of publishers and authors sued Google in 2005 over its plan to digitize books, and the suit was granted class action status. That meant that when Google and the publishing groups settled the lawsuit in 2008, publishers and authors that held the rights to books that were out of print but still protected by copyright law had to opt out of the settlement if they didn't want to participate in the project. They have until next month to do so.

Gant will file a brief with the court arguing that this is "an abuse of the class action process," according to the Times, which also noted that some legal scholars believe this is a novel challenge to the settlement. Many of the objections have focused on the fact that with the settlement, there's only one institution in the United States that has the legal authority to scan out-of-print books still protected by copyright: Google.

The class action status meant that Google did not have to individually negotiate with rights holders for "orphan works," a vast undertaking that nonetheless should have been conducted if Google and the parties to the settlement were truly interested in preserving the rights of authors, Gant argues. As part of the settlement, Google has had to show that it is taking as many steps as possible to ensure all possible rights holders have been informed about the settlement and their options under the agreement, but Gant's brief plans to say that licensing agreements should not be established via class action lawsuit.

Google told the Times that regardless of how the deal was reached, rights holders still have control over their destiny, and can opt out of the settlement should they wish to prohibit Google from scanning their work. A final hearing in the case is scheduled for October.

Google is about to sign a deal with the French national library to grant patrons access to Google's archive of scanned books, according to a report.

France's La Tribune reported Tuesday (spotted by The Times Online) that the Bibliotheque Nationale de France has all but given up on its own attempt to create a digital library in partnership with other European countries, paving the way for Google Book Search to get a foothold on the continent. Google declined to comment on whether a deal had been reached, providing this statement: "Like we've always said, we'd be delighted to work with a prestigious institution such as the BNF and are currently in talks with them, but have nothing to announce at this time."

At one point, the BNF had hoped to create a counterweight to Google's digital book ambitions, fearing that English works would dominate those created by non-English speakers and "place interpretation of French and other continental European literature, history, philosophy and even politics in American hands," according to a 2005 New York Times article. But Quarero, the result of that initiative, has not really gotten off the ground and on a limited budget, couldn't really hope to compete with the resources Google has devoted to scanning books.

So, the BNF is taking a "if you can't beat them, join them" strategy, according to the reports. A BNF representative told The Times Online that it won't stop its own digitization efforts but plans to add Google's archives to its own.

Back in the U.S., the waiting period for Google's settlement with book publishers that will enable the project to move forward is almost done, with a September deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement looming. A final hearing is scheduled for October.

Google Book Search now calls out the placement of search terms more clearly in books and magazines.

(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)

All the talk about Google's Book Search lately has focused more on the law than the page, but Google continues to improve the product at the heart of those discussions.

Google rolled out several improvements to its Book Search product Thursday. Searchers can now immediately see where their search term appears in a given book, see thumbnails of all the pages in a book or magazine, and embed links to books in their blogs, among other things.

The improvements, detailed Thursday in a blog post, apply only to public-domain and those Google has negotiated the rights to publish. The hubbub over the Google Book Search settlement is that it grants Google the right to post copies of out-of-print books that are still under copyright.

Google, the company best equipped and most motivated to digitize the world's books, wants to offer the world an online Library of Alexandria. The decisions of the Justice Department, authors, book publishers, a federal judge, and Google itself likely will determine whether the company actually does.

Nobody in recent years has accused Google of lacking ambition, but its Google Book Search project is certainly among the company's top projects when it comes to chutzpah. That's not just because of the technical and financial hurdles of scanning, indexing, and displaying online millions of books, it's also because of the tangled intellectual property and legal concerns involved in the controversial project.

After revealing the book-search project in 2003, Google drew copyright infringement lawsuits from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in 2005, but an October 2008 proposed settlement, now under review by Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, has converted those groups from adversaries to allies.

The settlement, if approved, could neatly cut a Gordian knot of copyright entanglements though setting Google back $125 million. That's because it would enable Google not only to display books that are out of copyright and those that are in print by cooperating publishers, as it does today, but also those from the vast collection of in-copyright brooks that are out of print--even when those holding rights to those books didn't specifically agree to Google's plan.

The complicated proposed settlement invoked the wrath of some authors concerned it would grant Google monopolistic power over online publishing, and the court extended the deadline for authors to choose whether to opt out of the settlement from May to September. Then the other shoe dropped this month: the Justice Department signaled serious antitrust scrutiny by issuing subpoena-like civil investigative demands, or CIDs, to check into the matter.

AIG and General Motors apparently are too big to fail. But the way the opposition to Google Book Search is shaping up, it looks like some believe Google is too big to succeed.

This post was updated at 5:53 p.m. PDT with details about an extension request of the May 5 deadline filed by seven authors.

Google said Monday it's seeking 60 more days to find authors and persuade them of what it believes are the merits of a settlement involving its online Book Search service.

The proposed settlement of the 2005 case filed by the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers involves Google's right to show information from books online--in particular "orphan" works that are still covered in copyright but that are in limbo, for example being out of print or written by authors who can't be located. Currently, authors must respond by a May 5 deadline to opt out, otherwise authors will be included in the settlement.

"The settlement is highly detailed, and we want to make sure rightsholders everywhere have enough time to think about it and make sure it's right for them. That's why we've asked the court for permission to extend the opt-out deadline for an extra 60 days," said Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, in a blog post Monday.

"It's pretty easy for credit card companies to contact their cardholders--they send bills to them all the time. The world's authors, publishers and their heirs are much more difficult to find," Macgillivray said. "So, as the New York Times recently reported, the plaintiffs hired notice campaign specialists Kinsella Media Group to tell them about this exciting settlement, and Google has devoted millions of dollars to fund this notice campaign. Kinsella started by launching a website for authors and publishers and a direct-mail effort. Beginning in January, Kinsella published ads in newspapers and other publications all over the world from Fiji to the Cook Islands to Greenland. And of course, they also placed ads right here at home in the U.S., in publications as diverse as Writer's Digest and USA Today."

Google is facing resistance to the settlement.

Seven authors last week requested a four-month extension (PDF) of the May 5 deadline due to the complexity of the proposed settlement, among other reasons.

"First, two months' time is insufficient to understand the implications of a settlement of this scope," the appeal letter reads. "Second, substantial defects in notice of the settlement undermine authors' ability to assess their rights; and third, more time is required simply to understand the complex terms of the agreement."

Google is opening a new chapter in its book digitization saga, this time taking on the likes of Amazon.com's Kindle and Sony's eReader.

The search giant on Thursday launched a mobile version of its Google Book Search, giving iPhone and Android users instant access to more than 1.5 million public domain books. The works of authors such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens were optimized to be read on the small screen, a challenge the Google Book Search team called "daunting" in a blog post announcing the launch:

There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short).

However, as the team notes, there are frequently obstacles that keep the printed word from being accurately extracted, such as smudges, fancy fonts, old fonts, and torn pages. As an example of an "extreme case," the team presented the this page image from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground:

(Credit: Google.com)

...and the resulting extraction:

=> "lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve ...

The e-book reader market has exploded in the past year, with analysts estimating Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008. Last month, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos credited the "unusually strong demand" for the unit in helping the e-tailer beat Wall Street's fourth-quarter revenue and earnings expectations.

Google, which last year settled a 3-year-old lawsuit over its scanning project, may have timed this launch to upstage Amazon, which is rumored to be releasing its next-generation Kindle later this month.

Google has put out a cool update to its book search service that lets anyone embed entire books, or just book previews on their site. While aimed mainly at online retailers and educational institutes, it's also a great way to drop entire public domain works onto your blog in case you want to give your visitors something more exciting to flip through than your latest ramblings.

The news comes alongside some partnerships including A1Books, Books-A-Million, and The Book Depository. When you're viewing an indexed title on any of these sites you'll see a Google preview link that lets you peruse the innards of the book without leaving the sale page. According to a post on Google's Book Search blog, larger retailers including Powell's Books, Borders and Buy.com will be added "in the coming weeks."

On retailer sites a new preview option can be added that lets customers get a quick look at the work before purchasing it.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're wondering why Amazon.com is not one of the online stores to be included, it's because it's had this feature since late 2003. Its in-house "search inside" feature is essentially the same, although limited to titles within its catalog. Under Google's system, any retailer would be able to get this same functionality--including the capability to let readers view the entire work with whatever titles had been indexed. Back in 2006, the two companies traded legal blows due to the suspicion that Google's book search program was leading towards this functionality.

How to get the books on your blog:

There are a handful of ways to drop books wherever you want. Putting the hard code on your site also allows for fun stuff like the Book Bar, and special preview links that will send readers straight to the live view of the book. Google's documentation makes it sound like you need to use a lot of special HTML code onto your site's header pages, but unless you're planning to add books on a daily basis you can get by if you know any book's ISBN number (which can be found on Google Book Search).

Using Google's special embed wizard you just plug in the ISBN, along with the size you want, and it generates four lines of code you can put into a post instead of your site's main code. I used George Orwell's Animal Farm since it's in public domain, although you can take any title with a partial view as well. What's interesting is that you can't just grab this code from books you're viewing in Google Book Search. I assume this will be added later, much like it was on Google Maps. In the meantime, the wizard is your best bet, with results that look like this:

In a keynote speech this morning at the 12th annual Cyberposium at the Harvard School of Business, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, addressed various media headlines that suggest that the company's recent product announcements and purchases are all over the map. Not so, says Mayer. In the course of an hour, she laid out four areas that Google has deemed to be important--more content, easier computing, personalization, and better search--then demonstrated how various Google products currently fit into each bucket:

More content
--includes Google Book Search, Blogger, YouTube, and Google Earth

Easier computing
--Municipal Wi-Fi, the Google Pack download, Gmail, Google Bookmarks, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Personalization
--Google personalized home page, Google Gadgets, and Google Desktop

Better search
--Google Notebook and Google Custom Search

Of course, when someone lays it out for you, it looks pretty obvious, but until now the four buckets were kind of a mystery. Mayer hinted that more products are being designed or sought for each category and also suggested that more integration among existing products might be possible. Stay tuned.