If you're an author, publisher, or copyright holder, please visit the settlement administration site for information.
"This historic settlement is a win for everyone. From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder." -Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers
"It's hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it. As a reader and researcher, I'll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world's great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense." - Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild
"It will now be possible, even easy, for anyone to access these great collections from anywhere in the United States. This is a extraordinary accomplishment. The settlement agreement provides an unprecedented and extraordinarily valuable service to the American public, the opportunity to search and preview millions of books online. This is a service that libraries, because of copyright restrictions, could not offer on their own and goes well beyond what would have been possible even if Google had prevailed in defending the lawsuits." - Paul N. Courant, University Librarian and Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan
"This proposed settlement has far-reaching potential for making books more broadly available to the American public and higher education, and is consistent with Stanford's mission of sharing knowledge. We are currently in negotiations with Google regarding Stanford's participation. This proposed settlement is a very productive step, and we applaud it." - John Etchemendy, Provost, Stanford University
"With other libraries, those of the University of California and the University of Michigan, we have been negotiating for almost two years with Google and the plaintiffs to shape this agreement for the public good. We believe that the proposed settlement offers significant benefits for readers everywhere and therefore society as a whole, providing easy access to texts via Google to libraries throughout the country, and expanding dramatically the amount of material that can be freely read (not just searched) by the public." - Michael Keller, Stanford University Librarian, Publisher of the Stanford University Press
"I think this proposed settlement will break the logjam that has locked up orphan works for so many years." - Walter Hewlett, Member of Stanford's Ad Hoc committee on the Google Books Project, and a former Trustee
"Millions of books are held in our libraries as a public trust," said Daniel Greenstein, Vice Provost at the University of California. "This settlement will help provide broad access to them as well as other public benefits, and it also promises to promote innovation in scholarship. For these reasons, UC is pleased to have given input along with Universities of Michigan and Stanford in support of the public good, and we look forward to playing a continuing role by contributing UC library volumes to the development of this rich online resource." - Daniel Greenstein, Vice Provost, University of California
"This proposed settlement, if approved, will have major implications for both the creators and consumers of books. The development of a commercial market for millions of in-copyright books that are currently out of print or unavailable would be an attractive development for authors, publishers and readers. The settlement also introduces a model for institutional subscriptions that will provide broad access to copyright material for academic institutions. And it will greatly expand the amount of public domain material that is accessible to all. These elements of the settlement should ultimately prove beneficial to the University of Wisconsin-Madison community, and we intend to make our collections available for this project." - Edward Van Gemert, Associate Director of University Libraries, University of Wisconsin-Madison