After seven years of litigation, Google and the Association of American Publishers have settled the dispute over Google’s practice of scanning books, and both sides are agreeing to play nice. According to Publishers Weekly, Google will “acknowledge the rights and interests of copyright-holders,” while U.S. publishers can “choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project.” Because the settlement is private, few of the conditions were made public. But some experts suspect that much more happened behind closed doors than either side is willing to let on. "The publicly described terms sound indistinguishable from the terms Google has offered to its print partners for years," said New York Law School Professor James Grimmelmann. "If that's all, it's hard to understand why this deal took so long."
Bidding on Lena Dunham’s unwritten book, Not That Kind of Girl, has reached $3.6 million.
Despite stating that they would not, under any circumstances, carry any Amazon-published books, Barnes and Noble is having some trouble getting rid of the damn things. Moby Lives reports that Amazon books are showing up in Barnes and Nobles across the country—in New York, one “Amazon-affiliated” book was even placed on a featured table. When reached for comment, the chain blamed local stores for stocking the books, and ordered them to remove any Amazon books from their shelves.
Steve Jobs’s high school girlfriend and the mother of one of his children is going to write a memoir about the late Apple founder. Chisann Brennan met Jobs at Cupertino High School in California, and in an article for Rolling Stone, noted that even “at 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet.”
At the New York Review of Books blog, Tim Parks reflects on the singular weirdness of having a book adapted not just for the screen but for an entirely different culture.
