If I understand the agreement correctly, the agreement should reduce and perhaps even eliminate "snippet search" (for users in the USA) but it might actually increase "No preview available".

"No preview available" only ever applied if the publisher of the book specifically requested to Google that that none of the book be shown. See, for example, http://tinyurl.com/62b4kz

I'd imagine that some publishers might now push for "No preview available" status for their out-of-print books, if the alternative would be giving them "Limited preview" status. For example, consider out-of-print editions of books that are currently in print. Publishers might not want the out-of-print version cannibalizing sales of the in-print edition.

Either way it doesn't do those of us outside the US much good, does it?

"it will be very good news indeed"

If one lives in the Benighted States, maybe. For the rest us, this announcement means sod all. Sorry, but this sort of US-centric behaviour REALLY gets my goat, especially since the US no longer supplies the majority of Internet users.

If Google wants to have a global reach, it will make arrangements with other countries too. Look at Wikipedia with its long list of languages.

I guess they won't have to pay out very much in China.

The agreement shows that Google is ready and able to spend a pile of money and cut a deal, so you international users ought to go out and light a fire under your own copyright holders. But don't blame me for the weird complications of international copyrights.

And, for what it's worth, I think this could become a very big deal, putting all sorts of out-of-print stuff back into circulation. I'm very for it.

A-O-A!
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Stuart,

I expect that the agreement will be extended to other countries as soon as their publishers sign up to the necessary legal arrangements. As you're probably aware, the Internet itself started as a "US-centric" effort that soon extended beyond the "Benighted States". Maybe thinking about this precedent can give your goat some relief as you sod it with your sour grapes.

I thought the internet started at CERN.

DW, thanks for the superfluous lecture about (D)ARPAnet. The argument that the US should continue to dominate and control the Internet makes as much sense to me as does the idea that Schleswig-Holstein should regulate English since the Angles helped "invent" it.

AJP, it was the WWW that started with Berners-Lee at CERN, I think.

Schleswig-Holstein should regulate English
Not a bad idea, we could turn the whole thing over to Sili.

All I know is that in 1990 my friends at DESY, the particle accelerator in Hamburg, already had email and they were talking to people at CERN on their computers. The US wasn't involved. But perhaps some American invented it. Probably John Emerson, it's the kind of thing he might do.

I suspect he invented the hamburger as well. He's a slyboots, he is.

I did not invent the hamburger. When I go to Europe it is my plan to annoy as many Hamburgers, Wieners, and Frankfurters as possible with unfunny sandwich jokes. (For decades already they've been hearing unfunny Berliner jokes via JFK, even though these jokes are not really accurate.)

Oddly, Hawai'i was named after a Sandwich too, for a time, but then PC forced us to use the indigenous names. The joke wouldn't even be intelligible enough to annoy people.

(Why? Because they're there.)

I thought it was Al Gore invented the internet.

The joke wouldn't even be intelligible enough to annoy people.

Where there's a will there's a way.
What about Hawaiian toast? The Toasted Sandwich Islands.

Here's a negative view of the deal from an economics viewpoint along with some interesting comments.

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/11/is-google-happy.html

I thought it was Al Gore invented the internet.

He introduced legislation for a lot of necessary financing that wouldn't have happened in years otherwise.