In a New York City courtroom today, Judge Denny Chin heard from Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association Of Publishers about progress in talks.

Bloomberg reports that Jeannine Daralyn Durie, a lawyer for Google, told the judge that the company has made “substantial progress” in talks with publishers.

The American Association of Publishers also says talks are advancing:

“Today, we informed the court that the Association of American Publishers, the five publisher plaintiffs and Google have made good progress toward a settlement that would resolve the pending litigation regarding the Google Library Project.

Michael Boni, a lawyer for the Authors Guild, said the group “very much wants to work out a settlement” with the company, according to a Reuters report.

Judge Chin also remains hopeful for a settlement even though he said, “you’re essentially starting from scratch.”

While the negotiations continue, Judge Chin did approve a schedule of events that will move the case to to trial (if necessary) toward the middle of next year.

Law Professor and Google Book legal expert James Grimelmann has posted the preliminary schedule on his blog, beginning with plaintiffs moving for a class certification by December 12, 2011 and Google responding by January 26, 2012. He adds that settlement talks will continue while the pretrial proceedings are taking place.

Grimelmann also reports about a question the judge asked to the attorneys:

Judge Chin inquired about the framing of the case. He asked whether the legal issues focused on the display of snippets, or whether the plaintiffs wanted to “expand” the suit. Both [Bruce] Keller [Attorney for Publishers] and Boni [Authors Guild] made a point of emphasizing that they saw the case more broadly. Keller explained that it was about copying, scanning, storing, and displaying the works (including, but not limited to snippets). Judge Chin expressed surprise that the list didn’t include “selling.”

For a thorough review of today’s events and the complete pretrial calendar, Grimelmann’s blog post is not only a good place to begin but also an excellent resource to monitor as is his Twitter stream.

(gavel image courtesy of Shutterstock.com)

The Google book-scanning class-action settlement in the US was rejected earlier this year by the presiding judge Denny Chin, who has given the parties until mid September to come up with a new settlement framework.

It’s possible that the Hachette agreement could serve as a model for the parties in the US:

There are several key differences between the French accord and the U.S. proposal that Judge Chin rejected. One is that Hachette retains control of which books can be scanned and sold by Google, just as it does with copyrighted works that remain in print. Under the U.S. proposal, Google would have been free to digitize any out-of-print books, unless the copyright holders expressly opted out of the settlement.

The central problem with the US settlement was the “opt-out” provision for out-of-print books: copyright owners’ material would be scannable unless they specifically opted out. According to Judge Chin’s order:

In the end, I conclude that the ASA is not fair, and reasonable. As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted an “opt-out” to an “opt-in” settlement.

Giving control over which books are scanned back to publishers, as in the French case, might well “cure” the objections to the US settlement agreement.

Related Entries

• Google Book Search Settlement Rejected By Court
• European Commission Wants 7-Year Limit On Google’s Digitization
• Going Head-To-Head With Amazon, Google Launches eBooks
• Google Makes Deal To Scan Some French Books
• Study: Google Book Search Doesn’t Hurt Publishers, May Help Them
• Photographers Group To Sue Google Over Book Deal
• Google Updates Google Book Search After Apple iPad Launch
• Science Fiction Writer Le Guin Launches Petition Against Google Book Settlement As Opt-Out Deadline Looms
• Google’s Schmidt To Book Settlement Critics: What’s Your Solution?
• Google Gives Some Ground In Books Row, France Moves To Protect “Orphans”
• Germany Challenges Google Book Settlement
• Microsoft, Yahoo, & Amazon Will Fight Google Book Settlement

Google’s publisher partners don’t typically share revenue with the company, and the company has said it won’t disclose the terms of its relationship with Pottermore. Google will provide storage for the Potter e-books in the cloud, alongside any other eBooks purchased through Google Books. When asked previously about the decision to bypass retailers, Rowling representatives cited their desire to make the e-books as widely available as possible.

Checkout will also get a boost through the Pottermore relationship, as visitors to the literary site will have Google Checkout as a payment option, along with other credit and debit cards. Additionally, Pottermore will use YouTube for “global video broadcasts” in the future, according to Google. Rowling used YouTube for her first announcement about Pottermore.

The last movie based on the books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, opened last weekend, earning $542.5 million worldwide in just four days.

As The Laboratorium reports, Google’s attorney Michael Boni told Judge Dennis Chin that both sides “have been aiming for an opt-in settlement.” That would likely please Chin, who specifically suggested when he rejected the original settlement in March that an opt-in settlement would be a good idea:

As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted an “opt-out” to an “opt-in” settlement.

I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.

The case dates back to 2005, when many authors and publishers sued Google for copyright violations when Google began scanning books and showing snippets of their content in Google search results.

Chin set another hearing in the case for September 15th and warned the two sides that he’ll assign a “relatively tight schedule” if the case isn’t resolved, or close to it by that date.

Stock image via Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Using the Google eBooks Web Reader, which works in all modern browsers, you can highlight words with your mouse and select from a contextual menu to Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia.

A pretty useful tool when trying to find where certain words were used elsewhere in the book, plus the obvious look up features for definitions and translation.

Give it a try on Vanessa Fox’s book, Marketing in the Age of Google and then click on “View Sample” and the Google eBooks Web Reader will open up.

Related Stories:

• Google Book Search Expands
• Google Books Search Goes Mobile
• Google Book Search Now With Cloud Tag
• Google Book Search Improved(?)
• Google Updates Google Book Search After Apple iPad Launch
• Google Book Search Puts Magazines Online

The Authors Guild brought a class action lawsuit against Google in 2005 for “massive” copyright infringement over its book scanning project. The parties worked out a settlement  in 2008 and had sought to finalize that settlement after many rounds of hearings. The settlement called for writers who objected to opt-out or be bound by its terms.

That opt-out dimension of the settlement seemed to be most disturbing to the Judge, Dennis Chin. He found that the proposed settlement terms were not “fair, adequate, and reasonable.” Chin said the following in his order:

In the end, I conclude that the ASA is not fair, and reasonable. As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted an “opt-out” to an “opt-in” settlement.

I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly. The motion for final approval of the ASA is denied, without prejudice to renewal in the event the parties negotiate a revised settlement agreement.

Google issued the following statement by Hilary Ware, Managing Counsel, Google:

“This is clearly disappointing, but we’ll review the Court’s decision and consider our options. Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open-up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the US today. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll continue to work to make more of the world’s books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

The Authors Guild, which was seeking to have the settlement finalized along with Google, issued the following statement:

“Although this Alexandria of out-of-print books appears lost at the moment,” said Authors Guild President Scott Turow, “we’ll be studying Judge Chin’s decision and plan on talking to the publishers and Google with the hope that we can arrive at a settlement within the court’s parameters that makes sense for all parties.”

“Regardless of the outcome of our discussions with publishers and Google, opening up far greater access to out-of-print books through new technologies that create new markets is an idea whose time has come,” said Mr.Turow. “Readers want access to these unavailable works, and authors need every market they can get. There has to be a way to make this happen. It’s a top priority for the Authors Guild.”

My understanding is that Google effectively cannot appeal this settlement rejection. It would need to present a new settlement proposal to the court. The judge has offered Google and the litigants that opportunity.

(gavel image courtesy of Shutterstock.com)

google.books.settlement

Way before the advent of the Internet, there have been many business owners who wrote books to gain more attention and renown from the public. For some, it was merely a vanity status symbol. For others, it was a chance to gain some additional respect, and, hopefully, more customers.

Yet, for others who were already well established into being successful businesspeople, it was a chance to demonstrate what they’d learned over the years and to become known as the definitive experts in their fields.

Fast forward to the present and printed book may also be sources that Google refers to in assessing the relative popularity of businesses. Books may be a source for local citations which have gone virtually unnoticed by many online marketers.

How Citations May Be Used From Google Book Search

If you’re unfamiliar with “citations”, they are considered by many of us who obsess over local search ranking factors to be virtually equivalent to links in Google’s assessment of the relative importance of one business over another.

Citations may be mentions of a business’s name and address in text on webpages or in social media status updates. (I’ve theorized that citation analysis may go even further, including mentions of the address by itself as well as mentions of the business’s phone number and business name could also be counted as citations, too, under certain conditions.)

Since Google has invested so much in their Book Search and are continuing to develop it, their database of books naturally contains a great many which have addresses of businesses. These many books can provide a rich source of citations which could be tapped for the purpose of rankings in Google Maps and Google Place Search.

Since print publishing is harder to game in some ways than digital media, the corpus of data could be valuable to them in determinations of whether a business listing is to be trusted or not.

In a recent article, I mentioned how Google Places doesn’t allow companies to add new listings with PO Box addresses, but they do allow some with PO Boxes already listed in their source data to rank under local search. Google may be choosing to trust such PO Box listings when they see the businesses also listed in a number of trusted sources, such as references they may find to them in printed books.

Google may not be using book search data only to determine the trustworthiness of business listings — they might also use it to help determine relative popularity. The numbers of different printed books, magazines and other publications which mention a business could be used in evaluating relative popularity.

But, is there evidence that Google is actually using citations of local businesses from their scanned book data?

As you may be aware, Google Book Search is founded upon a program they initiated circa 2004 to begin scanning in many thousands of books from major libraries.

After scanning in all the pages of a book, they process the scanned images using optical character recognition in order to associate the words with each scanned page, store this in databases, and use their various algorithms to enable it to be searched and to rank books. They’ve also developed a number of elements of their user interface for displaying content from the book search results and book contents.

One step Google would have to take in order to associate places in books with mapped locations would be for them to look for and identify street addresses in the text of scanned books.

And, of course, they are doing this.

If you want to see examples, just search in Google Books’ for things like travel guides which highlight locations, peek into one of the ”About this book” pages in the results, and you’ll likely find that Google has cherry-picked a handful of addresses from inside the book and plotted them on a Google Map.

For instance, a peek into “The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive“:

Scroll down and you can see the map of some of the famous places featured in it:

If you were a local business, and you published a book about what you do, Google Books could potentially index your book, and your address in it might add to your overall citation rank value.

For instance, a famous vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, New York — the Moosewood Restaurant, has published a number of cookbooks over time. In their recipe book, “Sundays At Moosewood Restaurant“:

Google has identified the various places worldwide they’ve mentioned in the book, including mention of their own hometown:

Yet, there are many other citations of the Moosewood Restaurant to be found in Google Books, such as in restaurant guides, health books, and magazines. This issue of Vegetarian Times has their name highlighted in the tag cloud as well as in the mapped places:

Unsurprisingly, the Moosewood Restaurant ranks highest in Google Place Search for generic “restaurants, ithaca, ny” searches — and, ranking highest for restaurant searches in a place is moderately unusual for a vegetarian restaurant.

Is it because they’re so popular when people search on that area, or is it because they have a rich source of citations in multiple channels, including Google Books? Separating out cause and effect are difficult.

While it’s not necessarily a clue that some of Google Books’ interface features are prominent parts of Google Places, such as the maps, it is interesting nonetheless. As you can see above, they’ve incorporated user reviews to display on the About page for books.

Similar to Universal Search behavior, business websites are being listed in almost a one-box at the top of Book search results.

Here’s an example using one of my favorite restaurants in Texas which has also published their own cookbook — a search for “Royers Round Top Cafe” shows their website at the top of the results, followed by their cookbook:

An interesting question would be whether business owners who are authors gain any benefit from the frequency of their names appearing in Google Books.

One example could be Jonathan Kirsch, an attorney in Los Angeles who has written a number of books — not necessarily even directly related to his profession. Since his name coincides with his business name, his books may provide particularly good ranking benefit, such as ranking for search terms like “intellectual property attorney, los angeles, ca“, where he shows up in position #8 or #9 in Google Maps.

Could Print Yellow Pages Boost Citations?

Printed yellow pages directories are often found in libraries, so you might reasonably expect your print YP advertisement to give you a little citational “juice” through Google Books. However, I couldn’t really find any current major yellow pages books via Google Books.

If contemporary YPs were scanned into Google Books, you might see Google associating places with their listings, just as you can see in this old 2002 Ameritech directory for Bloomington. I can’t say whether the lack of yellow pages in book search is due to YP publishers choosing to opt out of having their books scanned, or whether it’s a choice on Google’s part. Either way, it looks like a lost opportunity for increased business exposure to me.

However, as print yellow pages books may become discontinued over time in certain markets, these sources of citations could be rapidly going away.

Widening The Scope Of Citations

It’s obvious that having presence in various other media channels such as videos, images, blog posts and books may help businesses have more opportunities to show up under Universal Search. Yet, various Googlers such as Matt Cutts have hinted that broader marketing tactics and more traditional promotional methods may provide businesses with greater longterm benefits.

As Google desires to shift from more easily-manipulable ranking factors to things which may quantify best practices, it seems clear that doing something like trying to gain renown and attention like getting a book published might actually give you some ranking benefits as well.

Of course, Google’s original PageRank algorithm was based on citations in scientific publications. Google’s founders had noticed that more important academic/scientific research papers tended to get mentioned or “cited” more frequently than less-important published research papers.

Based on that, one could rank academic research papers based on how often they were cited, and whether they were cited by other important papers. Google translated this concept from academic research papers onto the Internet, where they figured the link was the equivalent of a named citation.

There could easily be similar complexity in how local business and location citations are concerned. I wouldn’t be surprised if more weight were given to mentions in books published by more established, popular publishers. And, the relative importance of authors could figure in as well, too, since we know that Google is focusing more upon figuring out the relative influence of individuals in social media.

Aside from this rather loose case theorizing Google may be incorporating citations in print media for local search rankings, writing a book has traditionally helped business owners and companies to attract more attention and to establish their authority in particular industries.

Using combinations of traditional promotion tactics, such as publishing books and promoting businesses by inviting reviewers in and such — these things will help increase business referrals, longterm. If it helps your online rankings directly as well — that’s merely gravy for you!

Google is using a 15-year “preferential use” limit, but the report — and the comments of some EU commissioners — says that the limit should be cut to seven years. The New York Times describes the preferential use this way:

Androulla Vassiliou, the European Union commissioner for education and culture, backed the experts’ suggestion for a system in which companies like Google could recoup the costs of digitization, but also ensure that a period of preferential use was limited to seven years.

During a period of preferential use, a public domain book, for instance, that was digitized by Google would be available only through a library’s Web site, through Google’s Web site, or through noncommercial Web sites for that seven-year period.

Speaking to the NYT, a Google spokesperson didn’t say if the company would follow today’s recommendation. Google is still waiting for word on its proposed book search settlement with with authors and publishers.

I read several mainstream news stories about the viewer after it launched, including a long piece in the Wall Street Journal. Those articles were generally filled with excitement. My own reaction to the tool was more muted. I immediately wondered if the underlying data was actually that accurate.

Counting Words Often Goes Wrong

For years, I’ve seen people try to use regular search data to plot the popularity of terms and trends over time. That’s been fraught with issues, in particular, when web pages have the wrong date on them. With the Ngram viewer, I figured it might have its own issues, such as:

• Does Google Books get the dates of some books wrong?
• Is the distribution adjusted? IE, if you have more books in a particular year, can that cause some terms to spike?
• Are the books “even” in subject matter? IE, do you have more scientific works scanned in one year than maybe another year?

Scanning Isn’t Perfect

I hadn’t thought of an even more basic problem: OCR errors. OCR stands for optical character recognition, the technology of scanning an image of a word and recognizing it digitally as that word. It’s how Google has “read” the 5 million books that the Ngram Viewer lets you search against.

OCR isn’t perfect. Sometimes words aren’t recognized correctly. Google’s Ngram Viewer FAQ page addresses this (and covers some other issues like those I’ve raised above, and how they’re adjusted for):

Why does the word “Internet” occur before 1950? Most of those are OCR errors; we do a good job at filtering out books with low OCR quality scores, but some errors do slip through.

What A Difference An S Makes

That leads me to the F-word. For those who are sensitive, look away. I’ll be using the full word shortly, as it’s pretty awkward to write about this particular case without using it.

Yesterday, I saw venture capitalist Dave McClure mention a tweet from Brad Feld that linked to a chart of the word “fuck” being used from the 1600s through today. Curious, I took a deeper look. Here’s the chart:

You can see these huge spikes in usage early on the chart, but then by the 1800s, usage disappears until around 1960. What happened?

Well, at the bottom of the chart, you can see different years listed. Click on one of those year segments, and you get back a listing of books that contain the word, for that time period.

For the first period, 1650-1676, this is what I got:

You can see the mentions of “fuck” highlighted in bold. You can also see that they make little sense. From one:

their desires to fuck the blood

Fuck the blood? Was that supposed to be “suck the blood?” Yes, it was. The F in most of these cases — probably all of them — is in reality an S.

The Medial S

What happened? Blame the “medial s” (more about it here and here) That’s an archaic form of the letter S, where it looks similar to an F.

American students who puzzled over early government documents like The Bill Of Rights and seeing mentions of “Congrefs” are familiar with this (the image at the top of this article comes from an image of the Bill Of Rights from Wikipedia).

As a result, this usage of suck from the 1600s:

Is treated the same as the actual word “fuck” as written in 1991:

Google’s Ngram Viewer FAQ mentions this is a problem:

Why do I see so many misspellings like thif from pre-1800 Englifh books?

Use of the medial s.

To me, this seems like a big issue. S is a common word in the English language. If it’s not being distinguished from F, how accurate are all these charts being produced?

Not Found: First Written Usage Of “Fuck”

By the way, that 1991 reference about “fuck” is from Bill Bryson’s book, The Mother Tongue, where he explores the history of English. You can see in the screenshot from it above that Bryson writes that the first printed usage of the word “fuck” is in a poem by William Dunbar from 1503.

Google Books goes back that far, but ironically, it doesn’t find Dunbar’s poem with that word:

Instead, to locate it, I had to do some further research outside of Google Books, to locate the exact work attributed with the usage — “A Brash Of Wowing” — and discover that the exact spelling is “fukkit” rather than “fuck,” as you see here:

See the challenge? If you’re trying to track back to the first use of “fuck” (or any word) using the Ngram viewer, you’d better be checking for all forms of that word — and that means having a good knowledge of how language has changed, over time.

Further, the task is complicated by reprints. After several searches, I couldn’t find the original printing of “A Brash Of Wowing” from the 1500s (which doesn’t surprise me, as it has to be extremely rare). But I had no problem finding copies from later dates, such as 2003. Those reprints may skew the usage of words higher, potentially, over time.

Searcher, Beware

I’m hoping that the academic researchers using this material are indeed adjusting for these and other potential traps. It would be terrible if they’re simply taking whatever numbers the Ngram viewer spits out without doing some deep analysis in each case they study.

For the casual searcher, the Ngram viewer needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt, I’d say. It’s fun. It might give you some idea of trends. But it could also be putting out data that’s all fukkit up.

Postscript: Gary Price of ResourceShelf pointed out this post from the Binder Blog that takes another look at problems with the Ngram viewer.

Google has rolled out its long awaited digital ebooks program, the next step in the company’s ambitious but controversial project to scan and make searchable the estimated 130 million books that exist in print versions.

“The next logical iteration for us is to open up a bookstore,” said Scott Dougall, product management director for Google eBooks. This means that Google is now in direct competition with other ebook sellers, such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony and others—with one significant difference: While ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook and other ebook devices are readable solely on those devices (with a few kludgey exceptions, such as the Kindle iPhone app), Google eBooks can be displayed on any device that can access the web.

You can read eBooks through a web browser, or via free downloadable apps for Apple and Android devices. Dougall said reading an eBook on multiple devices is seamless, allowing you to start reading on an iPad during breakfast, for example, continuing on an Android phone during your commute then switching to a computer at work without any hassle.

So far, as part of the Google Books initiative, the company has scanned 50 million books in over 100 countries. At today’s launch, more than three million of those scanned editions will be available as eBooks—both free books that are in the public domain and “hundreds of thousands” of books for sale, according to Dougall.

Google has not changed its ranking algorithms and books will continue to appear in regular search results (try Huckleberry Finn and scroll down to the bottom of the result page). Google has also introduced a dedicated eBooks search page at books.google.com/ebooks that limits results to only books available in the eBooks format.

Partnering With Authors, Publishers & Booksellers

Google’s efforts to scan books have generated controversy from nearly the beginning. “We started in 2004 with the goal of scanning all the books in the world and making them searchable,” said Dougall. In late 2005 the Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers both sued Google, citing “massive copyright infringement.” Other lawsuits followed. In 2008 the Authors Guild came to terms with Google, though the U.S. Department of Justice objected to some of the agreement. Finally, in late 2009 a revised settlement agreement was struck.

While there are still unresolved issues, Google has moved forward with authors, publishers and even “competing booksellers” with the launch of eBooks. More than 4,000 publishers are participating in the program, as well booksellers Powells, Alibris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. Individual authors can participate in the program as well (instructions, agreements and tools are here).

For each group of stakeholders, Google has put in place revenue sharing agreements. The ultimate goal? “Sell more books,” said Dougall.

Google will undoubtedly sell many ebooks, but it is entering a crowded marketplace where the leader has a Google-like dominance. Amazon currently controls about 65% of the ebook market, with Barnes & Noble claiming a 20% share. Google’s advantage is its cloud-centric approach that allows viewing of books across multiple platforms rather than locking you into a particular device.

But as Google itself has proven with its ongoing dominance in search, habits die hard, and many people may be reluctant to let go of the investments of both time and money they’ve made in other platforms.

Want to know more about what Google is doing with books? See Search Engine Land’s comprehensive coverage of Google Books.