Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton

Re:Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are ... by ndiddy on Thursday September 24, 2026 @03:12PM (#49835499)

The Google Books settlement was originally going to make Google into a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. The scans would have been available for individuals to purchase for a reasonable price, and libraries and institutions would have been able to subscribe to a service that would give patrons access to the full text of every book. This deal fell apart because some research libraries and authors argued this was anti-competitive, as anyone wanting to make a competing service would have to go through the same process as Google of settling a class action lawsuit. They instead wanted Congress to pass a law to free up the rights to orphaned books. No progress on this was subsequently made because nobody in Congress cares enough about the rights to out-of-print books to get legislation passed. The whole reason why they're out of print when ebooks and print-on-demand exist is that they won't get enough sales to make it worth the time and money to figure out who the royalties should go to. The result is that nobody outside Google gets to see the full Google Books scans.

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Re:Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are ... by shagie on Thursday September 24, 2026 @08:48PM (#49838848)

Those scans are held at HathiTrust Research Center https://www.hathitrust.org/about/research-center/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust

> HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, administered by the University of Michigan. Its holdings include content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

> Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust (2014) was a following case related to HathiTrust, a project by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the University of California systems that combined their digital library collections with those of Google's Book Search. The HathiTrust case differed in two primary factors which were raised by the plaintiffs: that for viewers with disabilities, they could view the scanned text through a screen reader to make it easier to read, and offering to print out the scans as replacement copies for members of the universities if they could verify their original copies were lost or damaged. Both uses were deemed also to be fair use by the Second Circuit.

> The subject of the copyright of orphan works – works that may still be under copyright but with no identifiable rights holder – was a significant point of debate after both this and HathiTrust. Normally, libraries have been hesitant to loan digital copies of orphaned works as libraries may be liable for copyright violations should the copyright owner step forward to claim ownership.

The bill on orphan works that didn't pass was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Bentley_Orphan_Works_Act...

https://www.hathitrust.org/the-collection/search-access/copy...

And there are exceptions for copyrighted works allowing them to lend them out.

> Protected by copyright law, but made available: Protected by copyright law but made available on a strictly limited basis in accordance with the statutory limitations including, but not limited to, Section 107 provisions for fair use, Section 108 provisions for libraries and archives, and the rights provided to registered users with disabilities. In the absence of an applicable exception, no further reproduction or distribution is permitted by any means without the permission of the copyright holder. Lawful uses of works are provided only under the following conditions ...

Scanning still continues. https://www.hathitrust.org/member-libraries/contribute-conte... - though it's not at the same rate as it was during google books project.

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