- The judge overseeing the Google Books Settlement has extended the deadline for input until 10 a.m. on Tuesday, AP reports. Judge Denny Chin's office computers which handle electronic filing are down for maintenance through the weekend. A hearing on the settlement is scheduled for 7 October.
- The Open Book Alliance website is now live, so you can follow along as they provide links and analysis pertaining to the Google Books Settlement.
- Google posted a privacy policy for the Google Books program last night. To which the Open Book Alliance asks "Is 'trust us' good enough?"
- In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Nunberg calls Google Books "a disaster for scholars," taking great issue with the metadata: "it's so disappointing that the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess." Nunberg's created a great litany of these mishmashes, and it's true - the data are often incorrect (this is one of the things I've been harping about Google Books for since the very beginning), and this is clearly not (as Google claims) the fault of the libraries from which they're getting the books. Nunberg urges scholars to speak up about these deficiencies, which is absolutely a good idea; just yesterday in fact I emailed Google's engineers asking them to provide title page information for a book which comes up in a search, but without any bibliographic information (garh!).
- Amazon strongly criticized the proposed settlement, and the Authors Guild in turn slammed the book-retailer for trying to corner the e-book market.
