Thursday, November 6, 2008

21st Century Book Business

Have you heard about the recent settlement between Google and the Authors Guild / Association of American Publishers? If not, check out this article for a nice, brief summary.

What's the big deal? What does it mean? In a nutshell, "Google is suddenly poised to drive a massive change in the publishing marketplace, multiply by many times the number of books available at the fingertips of readers, and supercharge the market for online delivery of books."

The biggest implication is that out of print books, which were previously only available via used book stores (which don't pay authors anything) will now be available (presumably under a Print On Demand kind of thing) and authors will get paid. And I suspect the Used Bookstores will still survive somehow.

(How did I find this? I followed a link from Nathan Branford - Literary Agent over to The Millions blog)

1 comment:

Kim said...

Speaking of books, I got the box from Lulu the other day!