What would happen if Oprah endorsed my law firm? Are you wondering? Are you really? I don’t have a book to shill, or product to hawk other than my supreme skills in contract negotiation (I suppose). And parsing fair use, privacy and copyright law. But I do have thoughts on this week's two cosmic developments in the book publishing world: Google settles its 3-year old lawsuit with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, and Oprah intends to endorse the Amazon Kindle.

I do wonder: Which is the more important anthropomorphological event? (Is that even a word?)

Google always settles its lawsuits, so the settlement isn’t surprising in and of itself. The Authors Guild and AAP had sued Google over its Google Print Library Project in 2005, claiming that “continuing, irreparable and imminent harm” was and would continue to be suffered by publishers because of Google’s copyright infringement. Google had announced the staggering goal of scanning every book ever published – and with the help of the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan and several other major libraries, was modestly on its way to achieving it.

Google argued, as it usually has argued in copyright suits, fair use and, alternatively, non-infringement in the first place. Google relied on a legal theory blessing a “transformative” use as a permitted copying because of its public value and purpose, and argued that the Library Project qualified squarely as transformative.

I wrote at length about these arguments in Folio magazine last year.

Google today reportedly agreed to pay $125 million to settle with the plaintiffs and also agreed to establish a “Book Rights Registry” to allow copyright holders to receive electronic royalties. It was reported this morning in The New York Times.

The Financial Times also reported late last week that Oprah Winfrey intends to endorse Amazon’s Kindle digital book reader on her show this Friday, including interviewing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos about the Kindle on the show.

The blogs are abuzz with expectations of a bump in Kindle sales and the death of Amazon’s print sales business. (About this latter concern, the FT quotes Bezos saying “… when somebody buys a Kindle and the period after, they buy 1.6 times as many Kindle books as they bought physical books prior to buying a Kindle, and they continue to buy the same number of physical books.”)

The interesting thing may be neither result, with book sales still a $24 billion market and the biggest threats still being (a) people simply not buying books as much (electronic, print or otherwise) and (b) likewise, electronic books far from a serious scant percentage of the reading public consumption. (Anyway, a Washington Post book review last weekend on bird watching reported that spending on bird watching outpaced book spending by at least $6 billion in 2007.)