Could be a good time to be not yet in print

Google and the Authors Guild announced today that they're revising an agreement to pay authors for printed books that get read online. Along with the American Association of Publishers, the parties wanted to give Google the clear path to scanning millions of printed works, then offering them to read over the Web.

There might be no better time to stay out of print than now, while your as-yet-unpublished book isn't covered by the agreement. Published writers, you and your publisher have until June, 2010 to file an objection to the agreement if Google has already scanned your book. Nobody has seen the latest version of the agreement promised today. But DC Comics and Microsoft have filed objections to the existing settlement.

The Authors Guild threw up a roadblock to Google's scan-and-display policy when it was announced last year. A fairness hearing in US, scheduled for today, has been delayed until next month.

The Guild is the domain of the published writer, and the organization takes its eligibility to an exclusive level. Even if you have a book contract, it must "include a royalty clause and a significant advance, and must allow the author to retain copyright." Independent book publishers, who are accepting new books from new authors at a faster rate than major presses, are skipping advances these days. The Guild accepts members whose books are "published by an established American publisher... excepting small literary presses of national reputation."

So whatever agreement the Guild, major publishers and Google arrive at, it won't keep you from disputing when Google scans your small-press book and charges to read it. With exclusive eligibility requirements like these, Google is just ensuring that those left out of the agreement will probably welcome the online readership as a way to promote the books -- which will likely have links to online stores. That's where Google makes its money anyway, not in the per-reader charges.

Google gets all the books to search?

Over at the Boing Boing blog, the writers complain about the new online book search rights that Google just won in a class action suit settlement. It's a little tricky to parse out what this means, but it looks like if you have a book in print now, or ever did, Google can include its contents in a search result. This sentence kind of sums it up: "Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results."

Google, in acceding to the Authors Guild's requests, have attained a legal near-monopoly on searching and distributing the majority of books ever published.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results.

We all love Google, don't we? From the "search the Web by speaking" iPhone application to the wonderful shopping vistas, Google runs the online universe. But if I had a book out, and I wasn't one of the select 8,000 Authors Guild members, I'd be scrambling now to find out if my book's online rights were still mine to control. As the article says, challenging this settlement in court is going to be costly.

Not something to worry yourself about if you're still doing the writing and editing. This doesn't affect the practice of your writing art. It might reduce your ability to earn a living off a book, though. That thunder you hear in the air is the sound of Google's scanners warming up, ready to hoover up the pages of your book for a free search result on the Internet. Yeah, Amazon is big. But Google is bigger, smarter and hungrier.