Literary maven John Degen reports on Access Copyright’s seminars that explain the Google settlement to publishing types. If your book has been digitized, you should read all this stuff and get up to speed on what your rights are. Google’s page on it all here. Thanks for covering this, JD.

If you are a professional writer or publisher of books in this country, and are reasonably certain your books were available for sale in the United States (including through online services such as Amazon.com) before January 5, 2009, you are automatically part of the class in this class-action settlement. That means you are eligible for compensation if your works were digitized by Google as part of their sweeping library book scanning project. A minimum of $45 million in compensation (total) for this initial digitization will be paid out to authors and publishers at a rate of $60 per book, and $15 per insert (single essays, stories, poems, etc. within a larger work such as an anthology). Registration of claims for compensation will run until January 5, 2010. Once you have claimed and received compensation, you have effectively given Google permission to continue to use your digitized work in their Google Book Search service, but with some interesting and potentially lucrative side benefits for the copyright owners. Ad revenue for online texts will be shared with the authors and publishers, and Google will also provide a sales engine for online works.