Google Books engineering director Dan Clancy spelled out the vision at a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last night. Here goes: Google will partner with all interested retailers, so you'll be able to buy books wherever you like—at an online site or your neighborhood bookstore. [What about libraries?] The books themselves will be stored "in the cloud," meaning out on some Google server, rather than on your computer hard drive or in a device you own. And you'll be able to read them on any device you want—e-reader, phone, computer, or netbook.
This vision is different from the arrangement spelled out in the pending settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. That arrangement mostly deals with the out-of-print books Google scanned at university libraries, Clancy said, "so it's more about the past." The new vision concerns the future, in which many books will automatically launch with a digital version (as many do today) and where digital rights and licensing will be baked into publishers' business models.
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