Google booksearch is now legal. Well it was never illegal by any means. But Google has settled it with The Authors Guild or the Association of American Publishers who always had a problem with Google to give rights to millions of users to read for free, and had filed a lawsuit too. Reportedly, Google has settled the issue for 125 Million dollars!

Let us not go into that settlement. Here is what they have to say about the new policies.

Accessing books

This agreement will create new options for reading entire books (which is, after all, what books are there for).

  • Online access

    Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.

  • Library and university access

    We’ll also be offering libraries, universities and other organizations the ability to purchase institutional subscriptions, which will give users access to the complete text of millions of titles while compensating authors and publishers for the service. Students and researchers will have access to an electronic library that combines the collections from many of the top universities across the country. Public and university libraries in the U.S. will also be able to offer terminals where readers can access the full text of millions of out-of-print books for free.

  • Buying or borrowing actual books

    Finally, if the book you want is available in a bookstore or nearby library, we’ll continue to point you to those resources, as we’ve always done.

Types of Books

  1. In-copyright and in-print books

    In-print books are books that publishers are still actively selling, the ones you see at most bookstores. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the “preview” and “purchase” models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.

  2. In-copyright but out-of-print books

    Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to “turn off” that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.

  3. Out-of-copyright books

    This agreement doesn’t affect how we display out-of-copyright books; we will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as we do today.

Conclusion

Whatever be the case, we just want Google books to grow so that we, book-a-holics can read more and more. Thanks Google.