It’s been a long hard couple of months for members of the Google Books team. It started out to be what seemed like the whole world objected to their proposed scanning and sharing settlement. It turned out that Stanford is on Google’s side as a new deal was just announced.
Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal back in 2004. Now a post on the Google Public Policy Blog as stated, “Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States.”
The post continued, “That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford’s library.”
This could be an important agreement. It’ll be interesting to see how the settlement agreement goes before we can be sure that the terms will stick.