The book publishing industry and Google recently reached a settlement in the class-action lawsuit “The Author’s Guild v. Google, Inc.”, in which publishers alleged illegal use of content in the Google Book Search service.

This landmark settlement lays out terms for collaboration between publishers and Google of unprecedented scale. It will make a massive amount of book content available online, and enable sales in a way that satisfies service providers like Google as well as publishers. It also sets the stage for new digital business models and new service providers ready to take advantage of the infrastructure that the settlement requires.

To be ready for their new relationship with Google, publishers need to build digital infrastructures that rest on XML. Publishers will need to adopt XML content repositories, as well as tools and workflow processes, to enable structured content creation and management. And now more than ever, creating complete and consistent metadata and managing rights information is crucial. Services that repurpose and aggregate content across multiple publishers will bring about the need for standards in these areas as well.