“We’ve all been there: the Internet is suddenly down, and you can’t keep on reading your ebook to see what the character decides to do next,” says Google Books Product Manager Xinxing Gu. “Or you’re about to head to the airport and want to be able to dive into a newly-purchased ebook during a long flight.”

“Whether you are flying through the air, backpacking through the European countryside, or simply facing intermittent network connections, you can always read your Google eBooks in your Chrome browser or on your Chromebook,” says Gu.

Offinline access requires the installation of the Google Books app, which can be found in the Chrome Web Store.

Obviously you’ll have to download the eBooks themselves while you’re still online.

Mouseover the cover of books you’ve downloaded, and find the “make available offline” checkbox that pops up. This option can also be accessed by clicking the “i” in the right-hand corner of your screen.

In the Google Books Help Center, Google offers 5 tips and best practices for offline reading in the web browser:

1. You can only use this feature with flowing text (EPUB) books, as scanned pages (PDF) are too large for offline reading and not supported at this time.

5. If you have multiple windows open with the Google Books app, only one of the windows will show the percentage of Downloading completed. All other windows will simply display “Downloading”. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are working to fix it.

Offline reading is also supported in Google’s mobile apps.

“Let’s say you are reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and you’d like your friends to read it with you (or you have a witty comment to let loose),” says Google Books Product Manager Abe Murray. “Simply click on the Google+ Share box on the About the Book page or in a Google Books preview, enter your message, then select which circles you’d like to share details about the book with, and click ‘share’.”

When you share book info on Google+ it displays the book’s cover, the description, and title, which links back to the About the Book page on Google Books. It’s basically like sharing any other link.

“You can also simply paste the About the Book or Google Books preview URL into your Google+ Share box,” says Murray. “This will show the cover and book details, helping your friends know exactly what you’re sharing with them. While you’re sharing books, you can also +1 them, and the titles will appear in your profile on the +1 tab.”

Google pitches the concept as a way to share your favorite books with “literary circles”. To me it looks like just a way to share a link to a book. For those in book clubs in which the members all have Google+ profiles, this will probably be helpful.

The visibility of all of this should be greatly helped by Google’s initiative to get authors of web content using its authorship markup, which effectively puts authors’ profiles in greater view in search results. This should apply to book reviews.

Google recently announced that it is teaming up with Pottermore, JK Rowling’s new site, which will open up this fall to provide eBook services. The two are partnering to integrate Pottermore with various Google products and APIs. The Harry Potter book series will launch in eBook form on Pottermore.com in October, and they’ll also become available through the Google eBooks platform. I’m guessing these will be make a lot of appearances on Google+.

With that in mind, you can understand the excitement when Archive.org announced they would begin archiving books, as well. Termed the “Physical Archive,” the goal of Archive.org is, to put it simply, “preserve one copy of every published work.” Part of the preservation process includes digitizing the content within the books, with the following goals going forward:

Because we expect day-to-day access to these materials to occur through digital means, the our physical archive is designed for long-term preservation of materials with only occasional, collection-scale retrieval. Because of this, we can create optimized environments for physical preservation and organizational structures that facilitate appropriate access. A seed bank might be conceptually closest to what we have in mind: storing important objects in safe ways to be used for redundancy, authority, and in case of catastrophe.

The blog entry discussing the project indicates not all written works will make into their physical archive, and in fact, they indicate the number of unique titles in literature is estimated to be around 100 million. Archive.org’s goal is preserve over 10 million of these individual works. To facilitate this process, Archive.org needed a physical containment unit capable of keeping these printed works protected, and, well, dry. So they turned to the shipping industry for ideas:

Based on this technical literature and specifications from depositories around the world, Tom McCarty, the engineer who designed the Internet Archive’s Scribe book-scanning system, began to design, build, and test a modular storage system in Oakland California. This system uses the infrastructure developed around the most used storage design of the 20th century, the shipping container. Rows of stacked shipping containers are used like 40′ deep shelving units. In this configuration, a single shipping container can hold around 40,000 books, about the same as a standard branch library, and a small building can hold millions of books.

An example of the storage facility in question:

Books are cataloged, and have acid free paper inserts with information about the book and its location,

Boxes store approximately 40 books with labeling on the outside,

Pallets hold 24 boxes each,

Modified 40′ shipping containers are used as secure and individually controllable environments of 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit and 30% relative humidity,

Buildings contain shipping containers and environmental systems,

Non-profit organizations own and protect the property and its contents.

While such a task should be commended, is Archive.org’s goal any different than Google’s Library Project? Aside from the fact that Archive.org has shown no indication of monetary gain with their physical archive project — perhaps the biggest difference between the two; something Google has had to address in legal venues — making their approach a little more altruistic than Google’s.

Being the non-profit that they are, Archive.org is also soliciting donations to assist in the project’s undertaking. Considering their goal, it’s actually a cause worthy of donation.

Believe it or not, the FairSearch Coalition agrees. The organization sent us the following statement:

Today’s rejection of the Google Books settlement by Federal appeals court Judge Denny Chin confirms that allowing Google to acquire exclusive access to content and withhold it from other search engines – as Google threatens to do with ITA Software in online flight search – raises serious antitrust concerns. Judge Chin recognized that the proposal he rejected “would further entrench Google’s market power in the online search market.”

Today’s ruling reaffirms the Justice Department was right to take on Google on this issue and that enforcing antitrust laws is essential to ensuring that Google not be allowed to harm consumers or competition by illegally extending its dominance in online search.

If you’re unfamiliar with the FairSearch Coalition, it’s a group made up mainly of travel sites (including Microsoft, who has great interest in travel search with Bing, obviously) that was formed soley to push for the blocking of that ITA Software acquisition. Now, the group takes essentially any opportunity it can weigh in when there’s any question around competition and Google.

Google’s proposal, or Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA), would have involved those who did not wish to have their content included to opt out. “As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted an ‘opt-out’ to an ‘opt-in’ settlement,” Chin said in the court document.

That may be the only way this goes forward, which would likely please a lot of publishers and authors, not to mention other search engines.

Last month, Google announced that it had scanned, and converted from image to text, a million books from the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, an association whose members consist of the traditional Big Ten Conference schools and the University of Chicago.

“CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. — so this is just the beginning,” said Kim Armstrong, Deputy Director, Center for Library Initiatives, Committee on Institutional Cooperation on the Google Books blog.

Last year, of course, Google went from Book Search and providing free works and previews to also selling digital books, when it opened the Google eBookstore. The store contains over 3 million books that can be read on a variety of electronic devices.

U.S. Circuit Judge Chin expressed his opinions in a court document refreshingly light on legalese. He wrote, “While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA [Amended Settlement Agreement] would simply go too far. It would permit this class action . . . to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners.”

Then Chin continued, “Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

Finally, the judge finished, “I conclude that the ASA is not fair, adequate, and reasonable. As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an ‘opt-out’ settlement to an ‘opt-in’ settlement.”

Google hasn’t yet said much in response. It’s possible the search giant will follow Chin’s opt-in suggestion; it would almost certainly be the quickest and easiest way to resolve the matter, which has been in lawyers’ hands for years.

Or perhaps, given that Google is in no apparent hurry and has plenty of cash, the company will appeal Chin’s decision.

As always, we’ll be sure to continue following the situation.

A quick note in case you’re not familiar with the CIC: it’s an association that’s been around since 1958, and its members consist of the traditional Big Ten Conference schools, plus the University of Chicago.

Otherwise, Kim Armstrong, Deputy Director of the Center for Library Initiatives at the CIC, explained what’s taken place by writing on the Inside Google Books blog, "Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index."

Armstrong later noted, "Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide."

Then here’s a really interesting point: "CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. — so this is just the beginning."

That’s bound to be exciting news for a lot of people, considering that the remaining nine million books must cover a whole lot of ground.

The last time we heard about Hachette Livre and Google was probably when Hachette objected to the Google Books Settlement about a year ago.  Also, we should note that a French court convicted Google of copyright violations a few months later.  This announcement comes as a definite surprise, then.

Still, the basic deal is in place.  Max Colchester reported this afternoon, "Under the agreement, which will be finalized in the coming months, Hachette Livre can dictate which out-of-print books it wants Google to scan and the price at which they are sold.  Google is then free to sell the electronic book under the condition that it shares the revenues with Hachette Livre, a unit of Lagardere SCA."

The arrangement is supposed to involve thousands of books, too, not just a handful for which Hachette has no use.

As a result, Dan Clancy, the director of Google Books, characterized the whole thing as "a big break-through in terms of developing a framework that will work more generally in Europe.  It reasserts the control of the publisher . . . while making the books accessible to users," he told Colchester.

It should be interesting to see if Google’s able to press this advantage and seal deals with any other publishers.

Chinnappa’s rather lengthy new title is "Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google News & Books," and he should be well-suited to the position.  The contacts he must have made while working for the BBC will be worth a lot alone.

Chinnappa’s experience with negotiating media partnerships needs to be taken into consideration, as well, since he didn’t exactly luck into his most recent role at the BBC.  He started at the corporation in 2001, and earned a couple of promotions over the years.

During that time, his duties at one point included negotiating all of BBC News’s key agency contracts and looking after key broadcast agency relationships, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Anyway, Google told Robert Andrews that Chinnappa’s job will entail "a specific focus on helping publishers get the most out of Google News," which might signal that the company’s worried about lawsuits or Rupert Murdoch’s "taking stories for nothing" complaints.

Also, the position is in fact new, meaning Google’s started to show more interest in this sector for some reason even if those particular threats don’t concern it.

This should bring Google a fair step closer to achieving its goal of organizing the world’s information and making it accessible to everyone.  A post on the company’s European Public Policy Blog explained with regards to the first matter, "The books we’ll be scanning constitute nearly the library’s entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries."

And more specifically, "The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country’s constitution and its parliamentary democracy.  Anyone interested in Dutch history will be able to access and view a fascinating range of works by prominent Dutch thinkers, statesmen, poets and academics and gain new insights into the development of the Netherlands as a nation state."

Then, in terms of accessibility, it turns out that Google and the National Library of the Netherlands intend to make all of the scanned texts available via the European Union’s Europeana portal.

It looks like all sorts of individuals and organizations will benefit from this development, then.

Don’t hold your breath – there are many, many factors at work – but Google might even see an extra perk if the Dutch library’s willingness to cooperate influences the Google Books settlement case.

"Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University," says Google software engineer Will Brockman. "We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future."

"These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field," he adds. "We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation ‘a major contribution to what scholars can do.’"

Earlier this week, Google announced that Google Docs now supports optical character recognition. You can now scan documents, and utilize this technology in the "convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs Documents" feature.