Google Book Search Lawsuit Settled

Dan Cohen provides a helpful summary of the resolution of the Google Book Search lawsuit. Here's my summary of his summary and my reading of the Google statement:

• Google was sued by authors and publishers for copyright issues in their digitizing of books.
• Google now has permission to work with authors and publishers on making previews available of in-copyright books with possibilities for actual book sales or subscription service viewings.
• This is especially useful for in-copyright but out-of-print books.
• This agreement will also be a boon for research since rights are being granted to search all the digitized books. It appears that this is what SBL has done in allowing all its books to be searched. (Cf. this post from a few days ago.)

All in all, very good news for readers and researchers.