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Google Announces Settlement Agreement
Posted 11/17/2008
MADISON, Wis. –A settlement agreement announced on October 28, 2008 between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/ will bring significant changes to the digitization partnership the UW-Madison Libraries have with Google.
The agreement covers in-copyright books digitized as part of the Google Book Search Library Project. It will expand access to millions of books, provide free online viewing of books at U.S. public and university libraries, enable institutional subscriptions to millions of books, provide services for people with print disabilities, and allow for new research opportunities with the creation of research centers.
The agreement created a non-profit Book Rights Registry that represents authors, publishers and other rightsholders; the Registry will ensure authors receive money for their works under the agreement. The agreement will allow users to search the full text of over seven million books using the Google Book Search. The books include collections from renowned libraries around the globe and from more than 20,000 publishers and authors. Users will see links to libraries and bookstores where they can either borrow or purchase the book.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries have been very pleased to partner with Google during the past two years and expect to continue the partnership by contributing materials for digitization to the Google Book Search Program. The settlement agreement enables greater public access to public domain material, and provides for a library digital copy that allows the university to continue to conduct business as a research library. The university expects to fully evaluate the value of the institutional subscription product when it becomes available. The Google digitization project at UW-Madison continues to be successful because of the exceptional efforts by its project manager and all of the project staff in the Library and at Google.
The following is an article published in the November 5, 2008 issue of Wisconsin Week: http://www.news.wisc.edu/15850.