The last few months were probably long and hard ones for members of the Google Books team; it had started to seem like the whole world objected to their proposed scanning and sharing settlement.  But it turns out that Stanford is on Google's side, as a new deal was announced this afternoon.

Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal in late 2004.  In fact, Stanford was one of five organizations that, on December 14th of 2004, joined what was then known as an expansion of the Google Print program.

Now, a post on the Google Public Policy Blog has stated, "Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States."

The post continued, "That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford's library."

So obviously, this could be a significant agreement.  We'll just need to find out how the settlement agreement fares before we can be sure that the terms will stick.

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