Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
But they're not selling these books as far as I can see, are they? I thought this was about making snippets of the complete text available for search, with appropriate links to buy where there was a seller.
In many cases, where Google has the rights to sell the eBook, that seller may be Google, but I can't see where Google are accused of selling books where they don't have the rights, just of making them available for search.
Graham
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That's essentially correct, but unfortunately a lot of authors have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone even thinking about touching "their" books.
Just to answer your question though, Google Books does provide links now to several book stores (depending on the book) including Amazon, Chapters and Google Play. When someone buys the book, Google doesn't scoop the cash, it goes through the retail store like it normally does; if that store is Google Play then Google gets whatever mark-up they charge and the publisher gets their usual cut.
If anyone is interested,
here is a submission Google made to the U.S. Copyright Office. In it, Google describes what they have done to try and help with the general problem of orphan works, describes some of the issues with mass book digitization projects and advocates for the Copyright Office to do something about the orphan works problems.