Recently, Google announced that a settlement had been reached with a large group of authors and publishers who were suing the giant search engine because it had scanned and indexed large numbers of books, including library collections from major universities.  Many of these books were still protected by copyright.  If you want to see how this works, go to http://books.google.com/ and search for a book.  Not only can you see some pages from the book, you see search terms highlighted in the text.

Anyway, the news of the settlement is huge and has major implications for  publishing, copyright, and on and on.  What doesn't Google impact these days!

Google's own internal Blog has a pretty good description here....

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-chapter-for-google-book-search.html

In our own way, ANR is playing a role in this soap opera.  Check out the "Google Books" search widget on the ANR catalog site.

On the other hand, the settlement raises ongoing questions about just what exactly constitutes a copy.  Suffice it to say that the biggest battles will be about money.  Unless someone out there is writing the first book in a block buster series about a Wizard Farm Advisor going off to school at Nuthatches School at the end of an invisible high speed rail link to West Davis, I don't think one of our books will be the topic........no matter how good it is!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bob