Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web.

Perhaps you’re thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

Google has introduced a new privacy policy for Google Books, to try and appease the critics of Google’s enormous book indexing project. The company has also been in communication with the Federal Trade Commission, and has discussed both the new policy and a letter to the FTC on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Interread, the British company that owns CoolerBooks.com, has announced a partnership with Google in which it will include over a million public domain books from Google Books in its online library. This makes CoolerBooks the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books.

Google is now offering downloads of public domain books in Google Books in the EPUB format, which is an open and free industry standard for electronic books. This format is supported by a wide variety of different applications, so it should be easy for many people to access literature this way.

Users can download the public domain books by simply clicking the "download" button in the Google Books Toolbar, which provides a drop-down menu to choose the file format.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have reportedly banded together under the organization of the Internet Archive and antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, to try and put a stop to Google’s settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over Google Book Search.

Google Book Search has not always had the largest of cheering sections; between authors wanting more money and watchdog organizations calling it a monopoly, the program’s encountered a lot of challenges.  But an important organization stood up for Google Book Search earlier this week.

Google signed a settlement agreement with authors and publishers last year over Google Books. Google says that if it is approved by the court, it will unlock access to millions of books for anyone in the United States.

Today, Google has addressed privacy concerns that users and potential users have voiced with regards to Google Books.

The world’s largest university press has sided with Google in the ongoing Google Book Settlement debate.  Yesterday, Tim Barton, the president of Oxford University Press, spent about 2,700 words explaining that he believes even a flawed settlement is better than nothing.

Google has added a couple features to Google News that make it easier for users to find content from specific authors and journalists. This is ideal for readers who like the work of a particular reporter, but would otherwise be unsure of where to find just that person’s articles.

The Google Book Search team may have access to all sorts of literature, but the simple term "clear sailing" is probably fading from members’ vocabulary.  Another obstacle has come up as the European Union has decided to study if a recent settlement complies with local copyright law. 

At the end of 2008, it was announced that Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports was acquiring Consumerist.com from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media. Gawker has now dropped its Defamer.com site as its own entity and rolled it into Gawker.com as the site’s "column from Hollywood."

Google has launched a long overdue mobile version of Book Search for the iPhone and Android. This includes access to over 1.5 million mobile public domain books.

Google’s quest to organize all the world’s information has taken another step forward today with the announcement that magazines are now appearing in Google Book Search. In time, these results will also become part of regular Google searches.

For those of you sitting around this evening either avoiding trick-or-treaters, or just simply looking for some ghostly entertainment to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve, Google has some special content set aside for you.

Not only are they featuring some Halloween Books on the front page of Google Book Search:

Google is now indexing scanned documents in search results. In other words if you scan a page of text and post it to the web, it will be treated like an actual page of text rather than the image that it truly is (theoretically at least).

Google’s book-scanning and -sharing problems are, in short, almost gone.  Pending the approval of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Google has agreed to a host of steps that will satisfy the Authors Guild, John Wiley & Sons, the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, the Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster.

Google really has the ball rolling on the controversial Google Book Search project. Reuters is reporting that 20,000 publishers have signed on over the last year, doubling the number of partners that Google has. The company has also added two new library partners over the last year bringing that number up to 29.

A group of libraries that are participating in the Google Books Library Project want to make sure that their work lives on in case Google doesn’t. They’re forming a backup database of digitized books in case Google should go out of business in the future (insert joke or snide comment here). The database is called HathiTrust.

Today, Google has made the books that it features in Google Book Search available to embed on any website, similar to the way you can embed a YouTube video. Here’s how.

Random House maybe closer to joining Google’s book search project, something the world’s largest publisher has been opposed to in the past.

Google Book Search has, up until now, provided images of text; these were fine for reading, but not so great for anything else.  So the service is taking a step forward and offering true “text layers” of many of its out-of-copyright books.

It once was the case that, if Google Book Search hadn’t yet made a book available in digital form, you were out of luck – that was the end of this particular resource’s line.  But Google is now helping its users find those books out in the real world, and it’s also supplying more reviews and references (and books in French and Swiss) than ever before.