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Originally Posted by Daithi
After reading the Authors Guild FAQ there were a few things I found interesting.
1) Books that are in print will NOT be available to even preview, unless the rightsholder decides to participate in the program.
2) Books that are not in print will be available for preview, unless the rightsholder decides not to participate.
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No surprise. The lawsuit was in part brought by authors stung because Google hadn't specifically secured their permision to make their texts available.
Google was uning an "opt out" model. The Author's Guild wanted it "opt in".
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3) Only the Preview is available to us for FREE. If we want to view the whole book we need to pay for it, unless it is out of copyright or we are accessing the books through a library that is subscribed to the Google service. At this point in time there is no monthly subscription fee available to the general public.
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I don't expect to see a general public subscription fee. Subscriptions for libraries are one thing. Offering it the the general public is more complex.
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4) How much will we need to pay to access a full view of the books? They are not saying.
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Probably because it hasn't been decided, and may vary by book, depending on the terms required by the rights holder. (I can see some rights holders having a wildly optimistic view of how much anyone will pay to view their book...)
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Personally, I'm happy to see that more books are being made available to us. I also like the idea a previous poster made about Google offering their own eReader. Something like the Plastic Logic device, which can display full page PDFs, would be pretty cool. I really don't want to read PDF books on a backlit computer screen.
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I can't see Google getting into the consumer hardware business. I
can see Google offering the required software under an open source license, like the Android cell phone OS, that someone
else can put into hardware to offer a reader.
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It may also be possible for Google to provide just the text of the book at some point. As others on this forum have already pointed out, the Google books are PDF books, and a PDF is generally just a scanned page. However, a PDF can also contain the machine readable text within the PDF. And most (or all) the Google PDFs already contain this text. This is how they know which books, and book pages, to display to you when you do a search. It is also how they know which words to highlight when they display the pages. At least that is my understanding.
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You can get the text of the book now, but it's not terribly useful without a lot of editing and cleanup.
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Dennis