"We are working on a platform that will let publishers give readers full access to a book online." The man who said this is Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, and the source that first brought this story online it is The Times, here and here.

While the first article cites David Worlock of New York Public Library, Electronic Publishing Services, saying "Ultimately it’s not up to Google or the publishers to decide how books will be read. It’s the readers who will have the final say" it also quite rightly reports Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, observing "that Google is not what it seems. Its search results are biased by commercial and cultural pressures".

Timescales of this "iTunes for books" project, as it was branded on the Internet, are not discussed. According to The Times Google said the project was likely to come to fruition "'sooner rather than later'". So if we speculate a little bit we should expect a Beta of the project some time this year, maybe spectacularly coinciding with a next step in the lawsuit of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers vs Google over the google books project and its "cooperation contract" with public libraries. Google certainly is one of the biggest players in the business of Content Aggregation that probably seems to promise the long expected path to revenue from textual content on the Internet.

And while texts don't grow on trees it would be interesting to see if authors get "equitable remuneration" (Berne Convention) from these channels … or "fair compensation" (European Information Society Directive) … or simply nothing