Google Gives Orphan Books a Home

Google’s never-ending quest to build a modern-day oracle—a super-repository of all human knowledge—has hit a snag. It has to do with what are euphemistically called "orphan books."

The six-year-long Google Book Search project, which scanned 7 million books into electronic format, included many of these orphan books. These are books with no clear rights holder (for example: the author is long dead, has no heirs and the publisher is out of business).

Orphan books can cover every subject, genre and category.

The Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers, among others, sued Google because they claimed the search engine giant was violating copyrights by making these orphan books available over the Internet for a profit.

Google recently settled that suit for $125 million while agreeing to give 63 percent of all profits to the Book Rights Registry, a non-profit that will distribute the money to benefit the writing and reading public (whatever that might mean).

So far, Google will have the right to offer a preview of twenty pages of each book and then sell it at a price they determine. But Google isn't out of the woods yet. Other groups are claiming that Google is essentially monopolizing the online-library format. Amazon, for one. We wonder if the original Oracle (the one at Delphi) had to deal with copyright issues and lawyers.