Books Biz Cautious Toward Google Despite Revised Settlement

Google Espana by author Georges Ifrah

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) may have agreed a revised settlement with U.S. book publishers for its ambitious digitisation and online retail plans – but some in the book business are greeting the deal with gritted teeth.

During a roundtable discussion about the settlement, hosted by Google in London on Monday, Paul Aiken, executive director of one of Google’s two filing partners, the U.S. Authors’ Guild, said: “Google’s defence to our class action was to say ‘this is fair use, we’re only showing snippets’… We disagree — our position is, you have the whole book digitised and you’re making commercial use of it.” Google consistently has “stuck to their guns” on the issue, but Aiken stresses it’s not unusual in such legal agreements for both sides to fundamentally disagree and yet still find a solution.

Google and publishers had to revise the settlement with publishers to get around objections to the original deal. Aiken revealed that the revised deal cuts out about 60 percent of books that would have been covered by the original deal, leaving just English-language titles from the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada. The rest will gather dust, undigitised, and Google is left with an English-only archive.

From a UK perspective, it’s clear that the deal is considered the best option available in the circumstances, rather than the ideal solution: “From the point of view of UK publishers there’s undeniably an element of pragmatism at work here,” UK Publishing Association CEO Simon Juden said at the roundtable: “We could, of course, have not done this and retained the theoretical right to sue Google for something we know they shouldn’t be doing in the States…”

The deal only allows U.S. readers to obtain out-of-print works by British authors held in U.S. libraries — but one thing that is on the way for Europeans is the European Commission-funded Accessible Registries of Rights information and Orphan Works (ARROW), which in four years’ time will set up a European online registry of out-of-print works. And to avoid any further wranglings, ARROW will be platform-neutral, i.e., it won’t need Google to make it happen.

I caught up with Juden to find out more…

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