Webware

The judge overseeing the Google Books case has laid out the schedule for the second round of the final approval process, at the same time granting preliminary approval of the revised deal.

Like before, opponents of Google's settlement with groups representing authors and publishers will have a comment period in which to file objections, and books rights holders who want to preserve their abilty to sue Google for scanning their books will have an opt-out deadline. The final hearing is set for February 18 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

After numerous interest groups and the Department of Justice objected to Google's original settlement over digital books scanning, the parties submitted a revised settlement late Friday night that amended the size of the class affected by the deal and wrote into the document explicit guarantees regarding access to the scanned material that were previously mere promises.

This wasn't enough to satisfy Google's most persistent critics, however, who will likely fill Judge Denny Chin's mailbox with objections to the revised settlement much the same way they did prior to the original September deadline. After the DOJ filed its own set of objections, final approval of the settlement was delayed until the parties could work out something more amenable to the government.

Opponents will have until January 28th to file objections with the court. That's also the same date for affected class members to decide whether or not they would like to opt out of the amended agreement.

Rights holders who opted out of the previous agreement also have until January to decide if they would like to opt into the revised agreement, otherwise the court will assume they still wish to opt out. Those who missed the deadline the first time around have a second chance to opt out by January 28th.

Google released a statement regarding the court filing. "The preliminary approval order sends a positive initial message; this agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form. We remain hopeful that the agreement will receive final approval from the court and will realize the goal of significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web."

The Open Books Alliance, which has vigorously opposed the settlement, weighed in a little later with a statement of their own.

"Today, in an expected procedural move, Judge Denny Chin granted preliminary approval to the revised Settlement of Google's copyright infringement lawsuit. This is not a surprising development and is not any indication that the court will or will not accept the terms of Settlement 2.0. The same procedural preliminary approval was given to Settlement 1.0, and now sets up a court process that will allow those opposed to the revised settlement to let their objections known to the court. The U.S. Department of Justice has until February 4th to weigh in with the court, as their investigation into the matter continues."

Google and groups representing authors and publishers have asked for more time to revise their controversial settlement over the rights to scan digital books.

Judge Denny Chin approved the request to extend the deadline to Friday, which was submitted ahead of a Monday night deadline for the parties to submit a revised settlement after the U.S. Department of Justice objected to the settlement as previously worded. After it was sued in 2005 by The Author's Guild and other groups representing the publishing industry over its decision to scan certain types of books without explicit permission, Google reached a settlement a year ago that would grant it unique rights to scan books that have gone out of print but are still protected by copyright laws.

However, that settlement has been met with objections from authors and privacy advocates almost since it was filed, and Google has faced a long and difficult road in getting it approved. Monday's delay comes after a Friday meeting with the Justice Department, according to a copy of the request filed with the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York.

Google refused to comment on the subject of that meeting, but it's not too hard to imagine that the Justice Department was not ready to give the new draft its blessing. It had previously objected to provisions of the deal that it felt "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." However, in recent weeks Google has sought to downplay the proposed changes as "targeted and surgical."

The patient apparently needs more time.

Every book project is a series of deadlines. Google's faces an important one Monday.

Google and representatives for author and publisher groups are due to submit a revised Google Book Search settlement in New York federal court Monday. It's been a long year since they first reached a settlement they deemed "historic," which would have granted Google unique rights to continue scanning out-of-print yet copyright-protected books as it builds out a digital library containing more than 10 million books, which also includes public domain works as well as books scanned through partnerships with publishers.

However, opposition to the settlement grew in the months following its release, and the intervention of the Department of Justice in September forced the parties to rework the settlement. Google has sought to downplay the changes that are in the works, but the filing will showcase just how much Google and author groups have had to bend in order to satisfy the government.

It's not clear how widespread the changes will be. The Justice Department objected to several items it found "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." The principal objection seemed to concern the Books Rights Registry, a nonprofit organization set up by Google and the author groups to distribute royalty payments from Google Book Search to authors. The group's directors will be picked by the parties, and while Google insists that anyone else who wants to scan out-of-print books can negotiate with the Registry, some objectors are concerned that they won't be able to get the same deal that Google has received.

The main problem, however, is that the settlement effectively sets copyright law precedent by affirming Google's position that it was, and is, allowed to scan books that are out of print but protected by copyright under fair-use rights. This does not sit well with many, and ahead of the revised settlement's release, Google's loudest opponents made their case that Google and author groups should defer to Congress on this issue.

"Congress must retain the exclusive authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to set copyright policy," declared the Open Book Alliance, a group that includes the Internet Archive, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo.

The revised settlement is expected to be filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late on Monday. It's believed that Judge Denny Chin will order some sort of waiting period for interested parties to review the settlement before holding a final hearing, perhaps in early 2010.

If you're a fan of comic books, you should also be a fan of the iPhone. Apple's smartphone is home to several neat comic-book apps designed specifically for those who want to enjoy harrowing stories of their favorite heroes in the Digital Age.

I've sifted through the many apps related to comic books and found a handful that you'll want to try out. Whether you're a DC Comics fan or you're partial to Marvel, I think you'll like what you find in these apps.

Get your comic on

Clickwheel Comic Reader if you plan to read comic books on your iPhone, the Clickwheel Comic Reader will be able to satisfy that desire.

When you start using Clickwheel Comic Reader, you'll be able to sift through comic books and find one you want to read. The app doesn't have many of the classics like those you would find from an app like Comics or iVerse Comics (see below), but it does have some comic books you might care about. Either way, the app displays all your favorite content in full color on your iPhone. And since it's free, it's probably worth trying out if you don't mind reading a relatively small collection of books.

If you want to read some comic books, Clickwheel might be your choice.

(Credit: Clickwheel)

Comic Envi If you're more into comic strips than comic books, we have you covered too.

With the help of Comic Envi, you can check out some of your favorite comic strips. You can check out old, well-known comic strips, Web-only offerings, and more. You have the option of viewing them in a slideshow or by moving them with your fingers. You can also check out the daily updated strips or some of the titles in the archive. It's a neat utility, but beware that you will need to pay 99 cents to get it.

Check out Comic Strips with the help of Comic Envi.

(Credit: Comic Envi)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.

The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many within the publishing and literary communities.

Nevertheless, Google has made painstaking attempts to engage with its enemies in the publishing world. Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, has traveled the country meeting with opponents and supporters, patiently explaining Google's position and preaching the value of a publicly available archive of digital books.

On Thursday, Google hosted a group of four librarians from Europe, where Google has signed partnership agreements with five libraries to discuss the benefits of the project. The settlement is obviously a U.S. matter, but the contentious issues in the settlement do not exactly apply to Europe, because Google says it has not scanned out-of-print but copyright-protected books published in Europe.

Therefore, in Europe Google has only scanned public domain works held by its library partners and books for which it has negotiated scanning rights with rights holders. Still, the settlement process is being watched closely by European authors who have had books published in the U.S., as well as European librarians who are a little jealous over the resources their American counterparts could enjoy under the settlement.

"It's like everyone in the U.S. gets to use cell phones and I'm stuck with a landline," said Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian and director of Oxford University's Library Service. "It's a tremendous barrier to advancing knowledge."

Make no mistake: getting this settlement finalized is easily one of Google's highest priorities of the year. There are financial incentives--Google will host links to book stores and place ads on the search result pages--but this is also a core part of Google's mission to organize the world's information.

Even the hardiest Google opponents agree that a digital library of the scope Google is proposing will have tangible benefits for the world. This is especially true for the European libraries, which store books dating as far as the 17th century that are crumbling with the advance of age. Few people are able to see those books because of their value and the remoteness of their location, but putting them online could allow the world to read books they would have once traveled thousands of miles to see, allow researchers from around the world to study their contents, and preserve the knowledge for future generations.

But some, such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, are wary about a single company controlling such a library. "The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected on the Internet," The Guardian quoted her as saying last week.

In any event, at the moment European libraries are on the outside when it comes to unlocking the knowledge stored in the millions of out-of-print but copyright-protected books on their shelves. Google's argument all along in the U.S. has been that it was allowed to scan those types of books under fair-use laws, which was disputed by authors and publishers in 2005 but authorization to do so is a key part of the proposed settlement.

Copyright laws vary across Europe, but the concept of fair use generally does not exist, and most books are protected by copyright for 70 to 80 years after the death of the author, the librarians said. Historical works are in the public domain, but that's just a fraction of the overall number of books stored in libraries throughout the world.

Out-of-print books will only be available as limited previews to searchers with links to stores at which they can be bought, but those books will be part of a database that is available to researchers and librarians through an institutional subscription. Researchers outside the U.S. won't have access to that database, which means U.S. libraries and universities would have an advantage.

"We ask our researchers what they want, and they say, 'we need a Google Books European settlement. We need access to books that are out of print but are still in copyright,'" said Klaus Ceynowa, deputy director general for the Bavarian State Library in Germany.

Manuela Palafox, head of digital editions at the University of Complutense of Madrid, Spain, took it a step further. "The most important thing in Europe is to review our copyright laws. We need to adapt it to the digital age."

This, of course, is part of the opposition to Google's settlement in the U.S. Instead of leaving it up to Congress to reform U.S. copyright laws to settle once and for all whether digitizing out-of print but copyright-protected books should be allowed, the settlement is granting that unique sweeping right to a single corporation, and forcing others who may want to digitize these books to cut licensing deals with an organization funded by Google and staffed by directors picked by the groups representing authors and publishers.

So while Google works feverishly on a new settlement in the U.S. ahead of a November 9th deadline, its legal battles may be just beginning. Chinese authors are reportedly gearing up to oppose Google's efforts, and its mission of organizing the world's information may be stymied if European copyright laws forbid the digitization of a huge swath of books published in the last century.

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold--into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.

Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.

BookPrep

HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

HP's BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.

The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.

The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn't care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book's scan--in most cases, a library.

Unlike the Archive's more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books--it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.

So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.

MagCloud

The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It's a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that's been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person's location as possible to save shipping costs and time.

The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia community sites. Users can now print "magazines" of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.

MagCloud isn't a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn't do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.

MagCloud publications are printed on HP's Indigo printers.

Taping up old pages

Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, "especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content." However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: "It's only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand," he adds.

Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won't vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that's an industry even Bolwell doesn't think printing technology should try to fix.

The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don't mean selling it to Google.

Wal-Mart Stores has waged an online book pricing war against Amazon.com, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday morning.

Wal-Mart sent the first salvo over Amazon's bow on Thursday when the retail giant announced that it would sell ten highly anticipated books for $10 on Walmart.com. Wal-Mart said Stephen King's upcoming hardcover "Under the Dome" and Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" will be included in that grouping. Wal-Mart's prices include free shipping.

Not to be outdone, Amazon reduced prices to match Wal-Mart's pricing on all 10 titles. That was quickly followed by Wal-Mart's decision to reduce the prices on those books again to $9 late Thursday night. In response, Amazon reduced the prices of all ten titles to $9, as well. The company also reduced the books' Kindle pricing to $9. That's where the prices stand on both sites as of this writing.

Sarah Palin's book is going for $9 on Wal-Mart.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

"If there is going to be a 'Wal-Mart of the Web,' it is going to be Walmart.com," Walmart.com CEO Raul Vazquez told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. "Our goal is to be the biggest and most visited retail Web site."

As viable a goal as that may be for Wal-Mart, it could also cost the online-retail industry dearly. According to the Journal, Wal-Mart is already offering up to 200 best sellers for "50 percent of their list price." That's a figure that most retailers can't keep up with. And as the publication pointed out, it's a price point that could put smaller, less powerful organizations out of business.

"Retailers traditionally pay half the list price for a hardcover book," the Journal wrote in its report. "Assuming that's the case with Wal-Mart, its $10 sale price on 'Under the Dome' represents a 71 percent discount of the $35 cover price, which suggests the discounter will lose $7 to $7.50 on every copy it sells." Wal-Mart might be able to afford that, but other, smaller retailers might not.

But $10 might not be a figure that Wal-Mart picked out of the air. Quite the contrary, the retail giant might have chosen $10 because it's the same price Amazon is currently offering e-books for in its Kindle store. Wal-Mart is, so far, on the outside looking in at the e-book market and the sale of highly anticipated hardcovers for $10 might reflect that.

That said, the company told the Journal that its decision to drop the price of those major titles had nothing to do with the Kindle. Even so, Wal-Mart is a major retailer with loads of cash that it can easily put towards infiltrating a discount book market--electronic or otherwise. A loss on select titles might be worth it in the long run. It could stymie some of the Kindle's impressive growth. That might have been Wal-Mart's intention all along.

What do you think of this? Is Wal-Mart the hero for offering hardcover books at such discounted rates? Is Amazon wrong for matching its pricing? Let us hear your thoughts in the comments below.

The Google Books case will drag on for at least a few more months, as a judge in New York has set a November deadline for the submission of a new settlement.

Google's original settlement with groups representing publishers and authors over the right to digitize certain kinds of books was met with howls of objection from authors, privacy advocates, and perhaps most importantly, the U.S. Department of Justice. A hearing on whether to approve that settlement was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but last month the publisher and author groups asked for more time to work out a new deal that satisfies the Justice Department's concerns.

The parties were directed by Judge Denny Chin to submit a reworked settlement by November 9, according to the Associated Press. An approval hearing would be held at some point after that, and the judge will only hear objections to any of the new provisions at that hearing.

The original settlement was signed last October, but final approval of that settlement has now been delayed twice as the publishing and technology communities grapple with the complicated and far-reaching effects of the deal. Under the settlement as previously written, Google would have been the only organization in the world with explicit permission to digitize out-of-print but copyright-protected books. In addition, an independent Books Rights Registry set up as part of the deal would have been the sole clearinghouse for revenue shared with book rights holders and would have had the power to set prices for institutional subscriptions to the library of scanned books.

The judge overseeing Google Books settlement has agreed to the plaintiffs' request for a delay of the final hearing scheduled to approve the controversial settlement, which is being reworked by the parties.

Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had been scheduled to oversee a October 7 hearing about whether to approve a 2008 settlement between Google and several groups representing authors and publishers. However, the settlement, which gives Google sweeping rights to digitize out-of-print but copyright protected books, has drawn staunch opposition from many corners of the literary world as well as the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a result, the settlement is in the process of being reworked, and Judge Chin agreed to give the parties more time to rework the settlement following a request from the plaintiffs filed earlier this week. "Under all the circumstances, it makes no sense to conduct a hearing on the fairness and reasonableness of the current settlement agreement, as it does not appear that the current settlement will be the operative one," Chin wrote in a letter sent to both parties.

Instead, the parties will hold a status conference on the 7th to figure out what to do next. Chin noted that this case has been in the works for over four years, when groups representing authors and publishers sued Google in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission.