It’s a contribution to the digital renaissance.

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Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief expressing concerns over a revised Google book settlement.

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The Google Book Settlement has finally been revised. There are two main changes that have been made: how the settlement pertains to other countries and unclaimed works.

Here’s Google’s official statements on those two issues:

International Scope:

As revised, the settlement will only include books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada. After
hearing feedback from foreign rightsholders, the plaintiffs decided to narrow the
class to include only these countries, which share a common legal heritage and
similar book industry practices. British, Australian, and Canadian rightsholders are
joining the case as named plaintiffs and will also be represented on the Board of the
Book Rights Registry.

Unclaimed works:

The amended settlement agreement requires the Book Rights Registry to search for rightsholders who have not yet come forward and to hold revenue on their behalf. The settlement now also specifies that a portion of the revenue generated from unclaimed works may, after five years, be used to locate rightsholders, but will no longer be used for the Registry’s general operations or redistributed to other rightsholders. The Registry may ask the court after 10 years to distribute these funds to nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public, and may provide abandoned funds to the appropriate government authority in compliance with state property laws. The Registry will now also include a Court-approved fiduciary who will represent rightsholders of unclaimed books, act to protect their interests, and license their works to third parties, to the extent permitted by law.

Google also took the opportunity of the revision to emphasize and reassure on other points of concern. They reiterated that the settlement didn’t prevent books from being sold at other retailers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Additionally, they will have agreements with libraries to provide access to Google Books.

Rightsholders also have the ability to limit what Google previews in book search results. You may have noticed this if you’ve ever accessed a book from Google Books. You’re happily reading along and then you get a notice that pages or chapters are missing. This is because the author wants you to buy the book and Google is complying with that reasonable request. If an author wants to make a book available for free or under Creative Commons licenses, they are free to do that as well.

Overall, the agreement is largely intact, with the exception to those two big changes mentioned above.

What to you think of the Google Books settlement revision? Will this be the final version or will they have to go back to the drawing board again? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Today, Google and the Association of American Publishers were supposed to have reached a new settlement, but instead asked for another extension. Judge Denny Chin, who has been presiding over the case, granted the request.

In September, Judge Chin granted the publishers’ request for a delay of the originally scheduled October hearing. The book settlement was announced last spring, but was coming under increased scrutiny from outside groups and the government.

The new deadline is this Friday, November 13.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Google announced plans to launch an eBook store. The store will be called Google Editions and will launch in the first half of 2010.

About 500,000 books will be available at launch. They will also be available for download on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Google emphasized that it does not have plans to make an e-reader device.

Google will pay publishers of the e-books 63% and keep the remaining 37% when purchases are made through Google Edition. When purchased through another retailer, Google will get a very tiny share, with 45% going to the publisher and 55% going to the retailer.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has taken to the editorial pages of the New York Times to pen a defense of his company’s book settlement. Struck a year ago, the settlement recently went into renegotiations after much opposition from various groups complaining to the Department of Justice.

Much of the opposition has surrounded the concern that the settlement would give Google some exclusive rights. Google has maintained that authors would be free to negotiate with other online entities as well. Brin reiterated that defense in his Op-Ed:

Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.

Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.

Brin closed his editorial with a reminder that books and libraries throughout history have been destroyed. He made an impassioned plea to preserve books online, so that further destruction can be avoided.

Yesterday, a federal judge delayed the October 7 hearing for the Google Books Settlement. The ruling was in favor of a motion by Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Google didn’t oppose it.

Judge Denny Chin said there wasn’t a point in holding the hearing when the parties involved are negotiating to change it. (Click here to read about the original settlement.)

The negotiations come in light of opposition from a wide range of groups. The Department of Justice also raised opposition, primarily in the form of antitrust concerns.

Instead of a hearing on October 7, the authors guild and Google will meet with the judge to determine how to resolve the case, which has been going on for four years, can be solved as quickly as possible.

Nearly a year after adding LIFE Magazine image archives to its image search, Google is now offering digitized versions of LIFE Magazine through its book search. The digital archive covers all 1,860 issues spanning from 1936 to 1972.

You can access LIFE by going directly to Google Books and clicking on one of the covers. Once you do, you’ll be taken to that issue’s overview page.

You’ll notice links to various articles on the overview page:

Below the links, you can browse through thumbnails of the covers for every issue:

Below that is a map of all the places mentioned in the issue you’re currently browsing:

Going back up to the articles section, after clicking on a link, it will bring up the digital version of the article. You can “flip” through the magazine as if it were a print edition.

Earlier this year, Google introduced the Search Options panel to its main search. The options allow search results to be filtered by things like time or content type.

Now, Google is adding Books as a filter on the Search Options panel. Take a look and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.