Google Becomes a Bookseller

Thursday, Oct 30th, 2008, 1:23 pm Intellectual Property No Comments

Google announced a couple days ago that they have reached an agreement with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers on their controversial book scanning project. Ars Technica has a good summary of the agreement, but in a nutshell Google is entering the business of digital book distribution in a big way. They will (continue) scan(ning) out-of-print books stored in a number of partner libraries, and make them available via a subcription service. The publishers and authors will earn revenue from long-neglected works, and Google will position itself as a major book distributor specializing in items on the far end of the “long tail.” As part of the agreement, Google is ponying up $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, which will help track down the copyright owners of these esoteric texts — everyone gets paid.

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