Life and Leisure

French publisher's boon for Google library

(The New York Times)
Updated: 2010-11-19 08:04

Google said on Wednesday that it had reached a deal with the publisher Hachette Livre, which has broken ranks with its French rivals and agreed to allow Google to scan thousands of out-of-print books for its digital library project.

Under the agreement, which follows a landmark settlement with US publishers in 2009, Google will be allowed to sell the books it scans as e-books or in other electronic formats.

But there is one important difference between the US settlement and the deal with Hachette, the largest publisher in France and the No 2 trade publisher by sales worldwide, after Pearson. Hachette, not Google, will determine which of the books covered by the deal - those that remain under copyright but are no longer commercially available - can be scanned.

Google and Hachette will share revenue from sales but declined to say how they will divide it. Under the provisional US deal, Google is to receive 37 percent and the rights holders the rest. The deal reached on Wednesday is non-exclusive, so Hachette will be able to make the same books available for other electronic selling platforms.

Google's book-scanning project has raised alarms with the French cultural establishment. Last year, President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to spend nearly 750 million euros, or about $1 billion, on a project to scan French literary works and historical documents.

A French court in December ruled that Google's book-scanning project had violated the copyright of three publishers owned by the La Martiniere group; Google is appealing the ruling. Several other French publishers - including Gallimard, Flammarion, Albin Michel and Eyrolles - have filed a separate lawsuit, which both sides said was not affected by the agreement announced with Hachette.

The agreement could "serve as a framework for other French publishers and maybe other publishers around the world", Daniel Clancy, engineering director of Google Books, said.

He added, "It retains control for the publisher in terms of how books should be used."

Google said it was negotiating with the remaining French publishers, hoping that the others would follow Hachette's lead, but it was not clear whether they knew an agreement with Hachette was imminent.

Clancy called it "a breakthrough agreement that should open up a new era for our relations with French publishers".

In practice, approval should be the norm, said Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of Hachette Livre. Hachette will also control pricing, he said, which should be in line with prices for new books.

The author James Gleick, who helped to negotiate the settlement in the US on behalf of the Authors Guild, said Google had to give Hachette a better deal because copyright law was stricter in Europe.

"In the US, Google hoped they could just scan all these books and call it 'fair use,"' he said. "In Europe, there's no such thing."

Nourry said Hachette retained the right to take legal action against Google over its past book scanning activities, saying "we have agreed to disagree about the past".

He emphasized that the accord announced on Tuesday was an "agreement," not a "settlement".

For all the French publishers, he estimated, around a million books remain out of print but still under copyright. About 75 percent of the world's books are estimated to be in this state of limbo.

The New York Times