Google Book Search Settlement Demystified

Assuming you haven't had the time, energy, or mental aptitude for legal matters to get to the bottom of what's going on with Google Book Search and the settlement reached last October, we highly recommend this helpful FAQ from Wired. It gets directly to the root issues of the debate sans stuffiness or legalese.

Wired points out (as have others) that the real benefit to Google in all this will probably not come from selling or renting books, but from selling expensive database subscriptions to libraries—meaning that the same libraries criticized by publishers for being in cahoots with Google's purported infringement could be the ones hurting under the new arrangement. Mike Shatzkin points out and discusses this irony in The Shatzkin Files (which, by the way, is a blog worth reading on a regular basis).