Google Books closes deal with France’s largest publisher

On her mission to offer as many digital books as possible, Google closed a perhaps historic deal with France publisher Hachatte Livre this week. Google may publish books from Hachette through her service Google Books that are no longer available in print, but are still under copyright protection. In exchange, Google must provide a digital copy of every book to Hachette. 

For a long time, France and French publishers were in disagreement with American Google. Earlier a French judge ruled that Google acted unlawful by publishing books through Google Books, without making deals with the copyright holders, in some instances French publishers.

Google Books was also under attack in the U.S. An American judge dismissed a general book settlement where Google would pay 125 million dollars to the American Author's Guild and copyright holders could appose to publication of their work through an opt-out. The judge however thought that the proposed settlement was unfair, inadequate and unreasonable.

President Sarkozy of France gives preference to French organizations to be in charge off digitalizing the French heritage and reserved 750 million euros to finance this plan. It now seems that Google will make a prominent contribution to the digitalizing of the France heritage with its Hachette deal after all, since Hachette promised to make digital copies available to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and other French libraries.

Hachette owns ten thousand France titles, almost a quarter of the total market in France.

Read more about the troublesome Google Books on FutureOfCopyright.com:

• Google Books settlement does not get court approval
• Second version of Google Books settlement met with storm of criticism
• French court rules against Google in Books case
• France will not rely on Google for digitisation of cultural goods
• Europeana to be boosted, could develop into a serious alternative to Google Books

Bron: NYTimes