The NYT has a piece that explains how Google has been scanning millions of books “that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.” With a legal settlement awaiting approval by the court, “just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is unknown, but few expect it to generate significant profits for any individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book program to contribute significantly to its bottom line.” AAP chairman Richard Sarnoff comments, “I think there will be a few authors who do see significant dollars out of this, but […]
Google Book Search
That Only Took Years: Google Book Search Syndicates to Online Booksellers
Google is finally expanding making Book Search previews available to sites everywhere with simple embeddable code. Significantly, they say that Books-a-Million has already enabled Google Previews on their site, and “in the coming weeks retailers like Borders and Powell’s Books will enable this feature as well.” (It’s already enabled at Blackwell’s site, too, and other bookselling sites internationally.) Which means that “browse inside” functionality is now available to any bookseller (or other site) throughout the range of titles provided by Google’s publisher “partners.” As with books displayed through Book Search itself, users can browse up to 20 percent of a […]
Google Book Search, en Francais
Google has now officially confirmed the enrollment of the the Municipal Library of Lyon as the first French institution to join the Google Book Search Library Project. Together they will digitize “close to 500,000 public domain books.” You may recall that in the early days of GBS there were two primary schools of griping: the we’re going to be included and we don’t want to be branch, and the we’re not going to be included (and horrible English works will smother the world) branch. Needless to say, the French were among the leaders of the latter camp, advocating for government-backed […]