Google has agreed to pay US$125 million to settle a class action suit brought by the Authors Guild and several publishing companies in the United States against its Google Book Search service. Authors and publishers will also get a cut of the future revenues that the service generates.

In return, the 28 October deal permits Google's US readers to see fuller previews instead of small snippets of copyrighted books. Libraries will be able to subscribe, which will allow their patrons to read the contents of entire books over the Internet. Text and data-mining researchers will also have the right to run computational queries in a 'research corpus' copy of the entire Google Book text and image database.

Google has already scanned into the database more than 7 million titles from university research collections and partner publishers.

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