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One bit not mentioned here: as part of the deal, Google is contributing $125 million to the creation of a Book Rights Repository. Part of the problem with making any book available is getting the rights to do so. With publishers going out of business or being acquired, it can be hard to discover who actually holds the rights to a particular title. There's a fair amount of work technically still under copyright and requiring permission to make available, but who do you ask? The author is dead, the publisher is out of business, and nobody knows who handles the estate...
This is intended to be a place to collect that information. Since it's Google, we can anticipate that it will be searchable. It will be a boon for places like Project Gutenberg, who must make sure a work is not still in copyright before releasing an etext, and others who might like to return a book to publication but can't find the rights holder to make a deal to do it.
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Dennis
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