James Gliek's book Chaos Theory was a big influence on my whole view of the world. So I was thrilled when a friend passed along this link to an editorial by Gliek on the recent settlement of the class action lawsuit the Author's Guild brought against Google. (Thanks, scorebaby.)
You may recall that the Author's Guild filed a lawsuit against Google over their plan to digitize and make searchable as many books as they possibly could, citing copyright infringement. The settlement itself looks like a good one for us content providers. We get the lion's share of any money that comes in from licensing fees, etc., that originate from the new exposure our works will get on the Google world library. If anybody has info on the details of how all that will be tracked, I'd love to know.
I'm not as sanguine about the future of the print book as Gliek is. I'd love to hear a more detailed argument from him as to just how he arrives at his conclusion that the road ahead for print publishers is through producing works of enduring beauty, but I do love that he's urging them to abandon their failed strategy of the past twenty years of courting the blockbuster at the expense of all else. And I do think he's correct about the hammer, too.
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