Google will pay $125 million to settle copyright violation lawsuits brought by five publishers including Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons, Simon & Schuster, and the McGraw-Hill Companies filed in October 2005 and a class action suit filed a month earlier by the authors Guild, arising from its Google Books Search that involved scanning millions of library books.

Google has about 7 million books scanned.

The agreement, subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, will lead to the setting up of a book-rights registry, which will make available the scanned books for viewing by millions of 'Googlers' either in part or fully and payment made to copyright holders.

Of that the $125 million that Google has agreed to pay, $30 million will be used by the publishers and the search engine giant to jpintly establish the registry.

Problems for Google arose when some of the libraries participating in Google's book-scanning programme scanned the entire  copyrighted books raising objections from publishers who said scanning the full book without permission, and storing it for public viewing violated copyrights. In its defence Google said that creating a massive card catalog to let users view only brief excerpts of books, should not involve its having to seek express permission to scan the books.

The settlement ends the lawsuits and allows useres to expand their online book searches, from about three or four lines currently to several pages and let readers buy full access to the content, the parties said.

Commentators have hailed the settlement as probably the biggest book deal in US publishing history since literally millions of books will  will be available to online readers.

The registry will manage two types of online book searches - while individuals will still continue to view samples of copyrighted books as before, they can purchase the work online.

Institutional users like universities will pay for subscriptions to the registry that would enable them full online access to the scanned books. In both cases, payments will be shred three ways, with Google's share being 37 per cent of the revenue, with the remaining going to the author and publishers after deducting an administrative fee by the registry.

Some of the advertising revenues will also be shared with the rights holdersin the same proportion, advertising will not be allowed in the actual pages of the books.

Google said the settlement will create a new market for out-of- print books, which are regarded as authoritative, higher-quality content, than what's avilable on the Web.
 
It said this agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.

What makes this settlement so powerful is that in addition to being able to find and preview books more easily, users will also be able to read them. And when people read them, authors and publishers of in-copyright works will be compensated.

If a reader in the US finds an in-copyright book through Google Book Search, he or she will be able to pay to see the entire book online. Also, academic, library, corporate and government organisations will be able to purchase institutional subscriptions to make these books available to their members. For out-of-print books that in most cases do not have a commercial market, this opens a new revenue opportunity that didn't exist before.

Earlier in May 2008, Microsoft exited itsprogramme to allow online viewers search digital versions of books, leaving th field to Google as the the only book search provider.