Imagine walking into the biggest bookstore you’ve ever seen. Rare, out-of-print first editions line the shelves. Cracked and dusty books from the days of yore have been restored to their former glory and they’re all at your fingertips. Shakespeare, Kant, Fitzgerald, and more. How much would you pay for access to practically every book…well, ever? Evidently, Google has decided we don’t have to pay at all. But they do. And it’s more than the price of a library card.

After being sued by both the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers, the peeps over at Google have settled their court case to the tune of around $125 million. According to Yahoo! Tech, this includes “$34.5 million for a nonprofit Book Rights Registry.” They’re also paying for “the millions of copyrights on books already scanned.” Oh, and legal fees. This is shaping up to be one expensive library indeed.

But it’s actually a good situation for everyone. David Weir, a journalist at BNET.com, makes a good point about this deal:

“As I’ve said before, this kind of business model presents the classic win-win-win. Consumers hungry to search for great content (and then equally happy to share it), provide the labor (when it comes to books, a true labor of love). The publishers and authors who hold copyright to the material get 63 percent of the sales, subscription and advertising revenue associated with all this activity; and Google, which supplies the technology, the vision, and most of the up-front investment costs, gets the rest.”

Hey, Google is paying $125 million so I can read every book in existence (and some which aren’t)? Sign me up!

Read the entire Yahoo article HERE.

Do you have a book that is destined to one day grace Google Library’s webpages? Well, what better time than now to find a publisher for it? If you’ve got the faith, why not send your religious/inspirational non-fiction book proposal to Pauline Books & Media? They’re looking for books and WordHustler is looking to help you achieve publishing success. And that’s a win-win for sure.

Well, sort of. It’s more of a metaphor, but an interesting one at that. According to the New York Times Bits Blog, Google has launched what they call The Google Books Library Project, where the internet monolith plans to scan as many books as possible into its online library, giving “users access to the complete text of books that are in the public domain, and to snippets of books that are protected by copyrights.” Google will also give each library a copy of the digitized books.

But for some libraries, that’s not enough. Enter the HathiTrust. Libraries at 12 Midwestern universities along with all 11 University of California libraries have hatched their own plan for storing the books Google has digitized because they feel that even if Google the company disappears one day, universities will always be around. Hence the HathiTrust- Hathi means “Elephant” in Hindi. Wonder how Google feels about that.

Talk about an elephant in the room…or in this case, library…

Read the entire article here.

Have you written a book that you’re sure will one day be immortalized? Well, you better get cracking to find an agent to represent you. Why not send a query or book proposal to the Minnesota Historical Society Press or the University of Alabama Press? WordHustler wants to insure future generations of readers get a chance to read the majestic works of today…especially if you’re the one writing them!

 
According to the LA Times’ Web Scout, “last Friday morning the opening line of ‘The Waste Land,’ T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, became one of most explosively Googled phrases in America.” Google’s Hot Trends, an online glimpse at what people are most ardently searching the Internet for at any given time, didn’t explain exactly why the phrase “April is the Cruelest Month” spiked in popularity. So the Times’ Web Scout had to dig deep…and you may be surprised at what he discovered.

Read the whole article at LA Times. 

Are you a poet like T.S. Eliot? Why not enter the Writer’s Digest Poetry Contest? But poets, hark: the deadline is June 2nd so hurry up or June will be the cruelest month too! Go, WordHustler, go!