The impact of the settlement will likely deliver the ultimate death knell to the already struggling public library institutions, writes IPgrll in her blog. And in a separate but similar analysis further below, Wade Roush says it’s not just libraries that are losing, but readers in general.

Read her entry in full for an analysis of the technical details of the settlement, and what it means for public libraries.

Here just the conclusion:

“So let’s recap. Google is going to digitize all books. Then, it’s going to sell access to those books to institutions, like public libraries. Public libraries currently cannot digitize their collections without a licensing agreement between it and the book’s publisher. Thus, the public library has been effectively cut out of the digital revolution – Google and the publishers made the deal and will dole out digital books to public libraries for a fee.

In order for public libraries to keep pace with the needs of their patrons for digital content, they would be foolhardy to not buy an institutional subscription. Public libraries will also need to digitize their own collections, or at least some portion thereof they want in on the database. Google has generously offered to place public terminals inside libraries where patrons can be directed elsewhere to find what they’re looking for – for free (but, heck, why go to the library when I can just do that from home).

Bye bye public library. Hello “terminal”…”

Wade Roush concludes the following from his analysis:

“the settlement seems to put an end to hopes that the Google Library Project would result in widespread free or low-cost electronic access to books that are out of print but have not yet passed into the public domain. These books—and there are millions of them—are in a painful state of limbo. They’re deemed commercially non-viable by their original publishers, so you can’t find them in most bookstores. Yet no one else can republish them without getting permission from the original copyright holders or their heirs or assignees—and for many so-called “orphan works,” these rightsholders can’t even be identified or located. So the only way to read one of these books is to find a copy at a used bookseller, or figure out which public or academic library owns a copy, and then physically travel there.

The hope was that Google—consistent with its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—would simplify access to these out-of-print but still-presumptively-copyrighted books by sharing their full text over the Internet at little or no cost to readers, the same way it does with the public-domain books it has digitized.

If Google had chosen to take the lawsuit to trial and prevailed, it might have been at liberty to do this, monetizing the practice (just as it monetizes all of its other services) through keyword-based advertising. Such a service would have been a great boon to readers everywhere. Indeed, when I interviewed a bunch of librarians about the Google initiative back in 2005, before the lawsuit, most of them were ecstatic: they’d been waiting for years for someone to come along and help them put their collections online. I bet Google could even have charged a little something for the service—after all, nobody else is trying to scan so many library books (7 million of them so far).

Alas, the nation’s authors and publishers organized a campaign to stop Google. Letting avarice run roughshod over common sense and the common good, the plaintiffs in Authors Guild et al. v. Google and McGraw Hill et al. v. Google argued that the very act of scanning an in-copyright book without the rightsholder’s permission is an egregious copyright violation. Even the short snippets of text that Google Book Search serves up among its search results were too much for these groups to stomach. (This despite the fact that the courts long ago ratified the inclusion of snippets in general Web search results as an example of “fair use” under copyright law.)

It quickly became clear that the plaintiffs in the lawsuits would sooner see out-of-print books remain in limbo forever than sacrifice one penny of potential profit to Google.”