• Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in New York delayed the opt-out and opposition-brief filing deadline four months from May 5 until September 5, 2009 on the logic that authors and opposition groups needed more time to understand the proposed (~350 page, complex) settlement. This, in turn, delays the Final Fairness Hearing from June 11 to October 7, 2009. Simply put: now the proposed settlement cannot be approved before October.

• The Department of Justice has launched an anti-trust investigation into the proposed settlement, reported here in the New York Times, seemingly centered on the rights to orphan works issue, challenged in a recent University of Chicago Law School working paper, The Google Book Search Settlement: A New Orphan-Works Monopoly.

Two more great topics to chat about with Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, when he appears at the Mark Logic User Conference coming up on May 12-14, 2009.

She starts with an easy lash-out against the (presumably blood-sucking) class action lawyers who stand to make $30M on the deal:

The settlement gives the class-action attorneys $30 million; a new, quasi-judicial bureaucracy called the Book Rights Registry $35 million (more on this later); and $45 million for owners infringed up to now — about $60 a title. It remains subject to a final fairness hearing, slated for June 11.

She then argues that Google has handed the publishing industry a massive data entry task:

Consider this: Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote — and every excerpt permission ever granted to others — at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google’s data-entry slaves.

She then discusses publishing economics:

Book publishers today are entitled to a share of the publishing partnership because they shoulder — not lay off on authors — all the costs of editing and publication and marketing. The author’s net profit share, generally half, in books, is for his creation. The author’s share rises against the publisher when the publisher’s costs are lower, as in digital. If the author shoulders still more of those costs and burdens, the publisher’s share should be reduced again. That doesn’t happen with Google.

And concludes:

The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out — just for Google. But U.S. law does not grant any single publisher monopoly power to herd all of us into its list.

See Slashdot for interesting discussion / reaction to the article. See this scathing rebuttal by another literary agent, Janet Reid.

Given all the interest, I thought I’d share a list of what I consider the top resources for helping publishers and other information industry stakeholders understand the Google Book Settlement, its implications, and the opportunities and threats associated with it.

• The Google Book Settlement microsite, which includes the full settlement in HTML or PDF format. Note that the full settlement consists of 16 documents with about 320 pages of text, hence explaining the need for summarization and analysis.

• A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement, produced by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries and written by Jonathan Band, JD.

• The Google Settlement: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore, a blog post by University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, Paul Courant.

• Google’s Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, the white paper by Bill Rosenblatt, mentioned above.

• Harvard professor Robert Darnton’s article Google and the Future of Books in the New York Review of Books along with a responding letter to the editor by Paul Courant et alia.

• Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s post, entitled On the Google Book Search Agreement.

• Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything, whose wrote My Initial Take on the Google-Publishers Settlement.

• Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader’s Guide by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• How to Improve the Google Book Search Settlement (draft) by James Grimmelmann of New York Law School.

• Perspective: The Google Book Search Settlement by Walt Crawford of Cites and Insights

• The Press FAQ from The Author’s Guild.

I should also note that Columbia Law School is holding a high-firepower, one-day conference on March 13, 2009 entitled The Google Books Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term?

Finally, for those more inclined to click through a presentation than surf through the above links, below please find this excellent 69-slide summary by librarian Lauren Pressley.

If you know of other excellent resources (not just yet-another-summary articles) please share them with me by mail or blog comment, and I will attempt to update this post to add them.

(Thanks to Jill O’Neill at NFAIS for pointing to me to some of the links I added in the second revision of this post.)

From the introduction:

The first part of this white paper describes the Settlement Agreement in the litigation, including the Book Rights Registry, the initial set of business models that Google and publishers will implement, and the set of business models that the Settlement Agreement contemplates in the future.

The second part discusses the future opportunities for publishers, particularly those that depend on publishers’ ability to build XML-based content architectures and make content available in structured formats with standardized metadata. It then discusses the capabilities that will be necessary for publishers to adopt in order to take advantage of these opportunities, including systems, tools, processes, and standards adoption where appropriate. Of course, a growing number of publishers are already starting to adopt these capabilities.

From the start of the second section:

The future business models contemplated in Section 4.7 of the Settlement Agreement differ qualitatively from the way that Google currently works with publishers – mainly in that they include several opportunities that require the availability of content in structural rather than page-oriented formats.

I believe the agreement enables Google to challenge Amazon in the sale of online books (and importantly, derivatives thereof) and therefore that publishers need to think of Google not as only a discoverability channel, but also a distribution channel — and ergo be ready to distribute their content in the way(s) that Google asks.

To me, this unsurprisingly suggests the need to store content in a centralized XML repository whereby it can quickly be repurposed, reformatted, and/or otherwise sliced-and-diced to enable experimentation about new and different ways to sell it.

John Kreisa from Mark Logic presented on the settlement with Bill Rosenblatt at last week’s O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference and here is an article in Publisher’s Weekly about the panel. The slides that they presented are below:

Bill Rosenblatt has blogged about the white paper and about the settlement itself on his Copyright and Technology blog.

You can download the white paper via the Mark Logic site (and be asked to provide some information) here. Or you can use the back door and download the paper directly via the Giant Steps site, here.