Google Book Settlement site live
As TechCrunch reports, following the $125 million dollar settlement with the American Authors Guild last October, the Google Book Settlement site is now live, enabling copyright holders to make claims for scanned books available online through Google Book Search.
Authors, publishers, and other copyright holders will get a one-time payment of $60 per scanned book (or $5 to $15 for partial works). In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works.
Here's the advice given to Guild members by the WGGB:
By visiting the Google Book Settelment website you can register your name and details of your books and, if the settlement proceeds as expected, you will hear in due course whether you will be receiving any payment. The deadline for claims is 5 January 2010 - it sounds a long way off, but it is better to deal with it now, otherwise you could easily forget about it until it is too late.
Action is more urgent if for any reason you wish to opt out of the settlement - that has to be done before 5 May 2009. We think you will find the Google website easy to use, but if you are a member of the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) - as most Full Members of the Guild are - your name and the titles of all books you have registered with ALCS will in any case be checked against the Google database of digitised works.
If you are not in ALCS, the Guild has arranged for you to access this process - simply send an email to google@alcs.co.uk containing your writing name and the title(s) of the book to be checked.
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain - along with other writers' organisations in the UK - is interested in discussing with Google a parallel scheme to allow for the scanning of out-of-print books held by British libraries, but we expect to have to wait until the US settlement is confirmed and operational before we can make progress.
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