We’ve had major interest in our upcoming webinar on the Google Book Settlement and unprecedented downloads of the related white paper, Google’s Settlement with the Publishing Industry: Opportunites and Strategies for Publishers, written by Bill Rosenblatt of Giant Steps Media and available for download without giving contact details here.
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.
- How to Improve the Google Book Search Settlement (draft) by James Grimmelmann of New York Law School.
- 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.)
Dave,In all humility, I believe I have written on the settlement discussing an angle nobody else has. http://www.idealog.com/blog/a-slightly-different-take-on-the-google-settlementandhttp://www.idealog.com/blog/more-on-the-google-settlementAbsolutely promise nothing in here is a repeat of other articles.
Hi Mike,I’ll read your stuff and update the post if I concur.Best,Dave