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Jon Stewart Addresses Google and Net Neutrality.

“It’s kinda like creating a carpool lane on the Internet, except instead of high occupancy vehicles, only rich a**holes will be able to drive in it.”

An oldie but a goodie. Click on the image to take a trip to the video.

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“When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is “Just how many books are out there?”” says Leonid Taycher, Google software engineer working on the Google Books project.

They counted 129,864,880 titles, or almost 130 million.

As you would expect, not everyone is buying Google’s count of all the world’s books, with Jon Stokes amongst others coming out with their own announcement, and that is the Google book count is bunkum.

So, a long time ago (at least it feels that way), having posted about Google’s desire to reproduce the world’s books, and the ensuing arguments that arose from it, I thought it was time to do an update on the books project to find out where were at and what had happened since we last discussed it.

So last time we talked about the Google books project, Amazon (who stood to have its book retailing market pulled from beneath it), Microsoft and various Governments (including the German and French) had weighed in on the opposing camp.

There was a fair bit of commentary, like this piece in Boing Boing and my own piece, How much power is too much power?
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Google’s book deal has hit more snags, with objections being filed in New York’s District Court by DC Comics, home of the world’s favorite superheroes.

Superman (or at least his well-paid lawyer) has added to the growing list of objections, in true dramatic effect with a last moment entrance, to protect his colossal cash flow from the evil clutches of copyright infringement on a global scale.
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GOOGLE has bowed to European Union pressure and will make concessions to European publishers and authors in an attempt to stem rising anger over its move to digitise and sell millions of books online, a report said.

It has made a promise to consult European publishers before cataloguing some European works in its digital library.

The company has agreed to have two non-US representatives on the board of a body that will administer a US legal settlement over the controversial online project, the Financial Times said.

The newspaper cited a letter sent to 16 European Union publishers’ representatives at the weekend. According to the letter, Google also promises to consult European publishers before cataloguing some European works in its digital library.
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