From Bloomberg:

Authors suing Google Inc. over the digitizing of books asked a judge to order the company to pay $750 a book for illegal copying and distribution of their works, according to a court filing today.

Google is being sued over its plan, announced in 2004, to scan millions of books from public and university libraries to provide snippets of text to people who use its Internet search engine. A Manhattan federal judge in May rejected Google’s argument that lawsuits by the Authors Guild and the American Society of Media Photographers should be dismissed because the groups lacked standing to sue for copyright infringement.

The Authors Guild today asked the judge for a ruling in its favor on three legal issues, one of which is a claim for damages of $750 a book. The guild also says it wants a ruling that copying books isn’t a “fair use” under copyright law, as Google has said it will argue.

Link to the rest at Bloomberg and thanks to Abel for the tip.

From Reason.com:

Google filed a motion for summary judgment today in its battle against the Authors Guild, which wants the court to levy heavy fines on the company for the copyright infringements allegedly committed by the Google Books service. Speaking as an author myself, my sympathy here is entirely with Google.

This isn’t just a matter of principle. It’s self-interest. As a writer, I gain far more from Google Books than I could conceivably lose from it.

If you write the sort of books that require you to consult other books, then Google Books is a wonderful tool. I use it to search for phrases in books I already own, a task in which it outperforms virtually every volume’s index. I use it as a general search engine when exploring a new topic or looking for different perspectives on a contentious issue, and it often points me to useful material that I previously was unaware of.

Link to the rest at Reason and thanks to Lily for the tip.

Hi all,

Looks interesting.  Unfortunately I can only post the link, not the video:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/7443946-google-unveils-new-tablet-at-sf-io-conference/#.T-tmvMUIvME.email

–  Julia Barrett

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg had a chat with two high-ranking Google executives: Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president, advertising, and Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome and Google apps.

. . . .

MR. MOSSBERG:Ari Emanuel [co-chief executive of talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment] last night about 22 times referred to you guys as basically unwilling to stop violating the copyrights of the kinds of people he represents. He said Google is able to filter out child pornography but is not willing to filter out unauthorized use of copyrighted material. How do you respond?

MS. WOJCICKI: I think he was misinformed, very misinformed. We have done as much as we possibly can. We do not want to be building a business based upon piracy. We want to be able to work with the content owners. We want to make sure that the business is built upon content and content owners who want to have that content distributed across search and YouTube.

We invested a huge amount in something called Content ID. The content owners give us information, either video clips or audio clips from their catalog that they have rights for. Then they can make a decision: if they actually want to keep it up and monetize it, which a lot of them do and make a lot of money from, or they can pull it down. And if they pull it down, then we immediately take it down. That’s their choice.

The problem is that identifying which copyright belongs to whom is very complicated. It’s not like child porn. Child porn, you see it, you know it’s child porn. When I see a piece of copy, I don’t know if you own the copyright or you own the copyright. It’s a complicated business.

MR. MOSSBERG: If somebody in this room uploads half an hour of some kind of comedy, do you have some kind of system that says, well, this seems like it’s copyrighted?

MR. PICHAI:It’s a quality issue, like voice recognition. The engineering behind the content system is fairly impressive. And it keeps getting better. What’s important to understand is it’s tough to scan through a video and know for sure that it’s copyrighted and who exactly owns the copyright. We’ve spent $30 million on this project alone. And we’re committed to improving it.

MS. WOJCICKI: The problem is this is much more of a business issue. Take a bunch of content, take a bunch of lawyers, and ask them who owns which content. I’m sure the lawyers won’t agree. There can be different components within the same show owned by different people. We can solve all the technical parts. But at the end of the day, in order to know what to do with that content, we need to hear from the content owner.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

From the Official Google Blog:

Entertainment is supposed to be fun. But in reality, getting everything to work can be the exact opposite—moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires…lots of wires. Today we’re eliminating all that hassle with Google Play, a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet.

Google Play is entirely cloud-based so all your music, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available to you, and you never have to worry about losing them or moving them again.

. . . .

With Google Play you can:

• Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks
• Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games
• Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks
• Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

. . . .

In the U.S., music, movies, books and Android apps are available in Google Play. In Canada and the U.K., we’ll offer movies, books and Android apps; in Australia, books and apps; and in Japan, movies and apps. Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps. Our long-term goal is to roll out as many different types of content as possible to people around the world, and we’ll keep adding new content to keep it fresh.

Link to the rest at Official Google Blog

Here’s a link to the Google Play store

Google is offering some inexpensive ebooks as part of its launch (25 cents) and, reportedly, Amazon is matching those prices.

Passive Guy blogged about Google+ a few weeks ago and still likes what he sees.

He’s also blogged about book trailers and how some are cute, but most of them aren’t that great.

So, here’s a Google+ trailer that PG likes:

It’s not perfect, but PG thinks this works better on Google+ than Facebook:

Google+ users — you know who you are — can share links to books with their friends. Particularly those that appear in Google Books. Many of these are available to purchase as ebooks.

Google explains how it’s done:

Simply click on the Google+ Share box on the About the Book page or in a Google Books preview, enter your message, then select which circles you’d like to share details about the book with, and click “share”.

The book cover, description and title linking back to the Google Books About the Book page will appear in your Google+ stream with your message.

I was hoping this sharing might work like a Kindle, which allows users to post sentences from books they’ve been reading to Twitter or Facebook. So I found a really good sentence from “Southern California: An Island on the Land” to share with friends to prove what a terrific writer Carey McWilliams was — but the sentence-sharing function isn’t part of Google Books, at least not yet, and with this book it wasn’t possible to copy and paste. Which means book sharing in Google+ is getting there, but it still has some catching up to do.

Link to the rest at the Los Angeles Times

Passive Guy blogged earlier about Google+ and he continues to like what he sees there. So do a lot of other people.

From The Wall Street Journal:

On Wednesday, Web-traffic watcher comScore Inc. estimated Google+ has had 20 million unique visitors since its launch, including five million visitors from the U.S.

. . . .

Still, the growth of Google+ has impressed observers because access to it is by invitation only, meaning people can join only if a current member invites them. And the company hasn’t yet marketed the service to the more than one billion monthly visitors who use its search engine, Gmail and other services.

. . . .

“I’ve never seen anything grow this quickly,” said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at comScore. The only other site that has accumulated as many new visitors in a short period of time is Twitter in 2009, he said, “but that happened over several months.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire after a few days)

PG has added an extension to his Chrome browser called Start G+. This allows him to see his Facebook stream inside Google+ (which is bad, but sometimes necessary), but, if he clicks on one of his Circles that includes only people he wants to hear from, Facebook disappears. This may turn out to be PG’s favorite way to consume Facebook.

Who knows where Google+ will end up, but PG thinks you should check it out as a social network that could be a very nice way to connect with your readers. Read this blog post to see how that might work.

UPDATE: A friend just sent this graph out via Google+ (Click for larger graph)

Google Books has announced a Rowling relationship:

When JK Rowling’s new website Pottermore opens its doors this Fall, we’ll provide services to help fans make the most of their ebook purchasing experience.

Pottermore and Google are teaming up to integrate Pottermore with a number of Google products and APIs. So when the series of Harry Potter ebooks launches on Pottermore.com in early October, these bestsellers will be available in the U.S. via the open Google eBooks platform. When you buy a Harry Potter ebook from Pottermore, you will be able to choose to keep it in your Google Books library in-the-cloud, as well as on other e-reading platforms.

. . . .

Pottermore will be the exclusive place to buy Harry Potter ebooks and digital audiobooks. You’ll be able to buy ebooks from the Pottermore Shop, push them to your Google Books library and store them alongside your other Google eBooks. Your other Google eBooks may be purchased from any of more than 250 independent booksellers or from Google directly.

Also under this agreement, Google Checkout will be the preferred third party payment platform for all purchases made on Pottermore.com. When you visit the Pottermore Shop, you’ll be able to pay for your purchases using Google Checkout, in addition to using a debit or credit card.

Link to the rest at Inside Google Books

The post was written by a Google Books BizDev person, so it’s not a model of clarity.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. You’ll buy all your Potter ebooks at Rowling’s Pottermore website
2. You can pay via credit card or via Google Checkout, the “preferred” (not exclusive)  third party payment platform
3. Once you pay for your Potter ebooks, there will be a way to push them into your Google Books library “as well as on other e-reading platforms.”
4. Google will “integrate Pottermore with a number of Google products and APIs,” so we may see more in the future. (PG has a good idea which site will appear first when you search for “Voldemort.” There is no better SEO strategy than to do a deal that’s important to Google.)

During his disreputable past, PG did BizDev for a couple of tech companies.

As an ex-BizDev guy, he gives the Google Books/Pottermore deal a C+.

Google is the first of the ebookstores to announce a Pottermore connection (unless PG missed something) which is good. There is nothing exclusive about the relationship, which is bad. It’s clear you’re going to be able to push Potter ebooks to other ereaders and, presumably, ereader libraries.

“Preferred” will be defined in some confidential contract, but it can mean anything from being first on a list of payment options to a web page no one reads that says, “Google Checkout is the preferred third party payment platform for Pottermore.” PG’s “preferred” date to the Junior Prom was the fourth girl he asked. (This was back in the days when “girls” still walked the earth and weren’t called young persons of the female gender.)

The real test is whether this deal improves the current fourth-place standing for Google Books. (1. Amazon, 2. Nook, 3. iBooks on iTunes)

Unless truly magical things happen with “a number of Google products and APIs,” the answer is no. The Google eBookstore is still the place where Muggles shop.

The iRiver Story HD, announced two days ago as Google’s ereader, receives a full-up review from PC World.

Excerpts:

The Story HD does a great job of distinguishing itself in display quality. As its HD moniker implies, the 6-inch display carries a 768-by-1024-pixel resolution, the result of an improved electronics backplane. That higher-res backplane in turn helps the E Ink technology–which already uses dozens of microcapsules per pixel to form letters and images on the screen–look better. IRiver is the first manufacturer to ship this technology in the United States; Hanvon currently uses it in China.

The result: Text looks sharp and clear, with smooth rendering and no pixelation or artifacts. The display supports 16-level grayscale. Text appears finer on the Story HD than on the third-generation Amazon Kindle, but its black tones lack the contrast and punch of the Kindle (and the Barnes & Noble Nook, for that matter). The lower contrast may be, in part, an optical illusion caused by the Story HD’s beige bezel; the Kindle and Nook each use a dark gray, borderline black bezel. Personally, I prefer the dark bezel to the cream-colored texture of the Story HD.

. . . .

For starters, the Story HD has no page-turning buttons alongside the display; instead, those chores are left to the four-way navigation bar beneath the screen. Although that arrangement isn’t so bad for navigation, it is an awkward position for page turns, unless you’re grasping the e-reader by the lower third (only then is it clear that the approximately 2-inch long, centered button is situated so that it’s in reach of either your left or right thumb). The button does only four directions, and doesn’t allow you to push in as you’d expect; to make a selection, you must move over to the dedicated enter button located to the right. Travel between the nav bar and the enter and option buttons feels organic for navigation purposes, but I repeatedly expected the bar to push in to select something, and I disliked how stiff the buttons were.

. . . .

The reader supports PDFs and EPub files (including protected Adobe Digital Editions), as well as text files, FB2, and DJVU formats. It also can read Microsoft Office Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents.

. . . .

Once I selected a book to purchase, I was first prompted to sign into my account. My G-mail username was pre-populated, but I had to enter my password. This screen’s design looks like a remnant from a Web browser: The sign-in is in such small text you might question your 20/20 vision, and it’s inexplicably squished up into the upper left corner of the screen.

If you don’t already have Google Checkout configured for your Google account, you’ll next be prompted to provide your credit card information. (Tip: It’s easier to enter this information directly on a computer or even a tablet.) If you have Google Checkout, you’ll skip directly to a confirmation screen showing the book purchase, any tax owed, and a drop down menu showing your payment options. Select complete your purchase when done, and your book is purchased.

However-and it’s a big however-your book isn’t downloaded. For that, you need to go back to the home screen, and make sure to download the book locally.

All of this is a few more steps than you need to jump through on iRiver Story HD’s competition. And if you’re buying multiple books in a row, it’s annoying to have to sign into the account each and every time.

. . . .

Frankly, that the U.S. market has gotten the IRiver Story HD at all is a surprise; the company introduced its first e-reader for international markets two years ago, and is only now bringing its third-generation product to the U.S. The partnership with Google Books should give this e-reader a boost, and may give Google Books a boost as well.

The iRiver Story HD design leaves feels rough compared with Barnes & Noble and Kobo, and the interface feels has some work ahead, too. But the emergence of the first Google Books-driven e-reader will surely drive competition among the players in this space, and that can only benefit book lovers.

. . . .

Pros

• Clean interface
• High-resolution XGA E Ink display

Cons

• Buttons are stiff, and poorly placed
• Sometimes sluggish navigation

Bottom Line

This e-reader offers a crisp, high-resolution display, but its chintzy design leaves much to be desired.

Link to the rest at PC World