Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. won preliminary court approval for a settlement of copyright lawsuits brought by with publishers and authors, a deal it said will enable it to make millions of books searchable and printable online.

U.S. District Judge John Sprizzo in New York yesterday tentatively approved the agreement and scheduled a hearing for June 11, when he will further consider its fairness. Under the settlement, announced Oct. 28, Google will pay $125 million to resolve claims over its book-scanning project.

The owner of the most popular Internet search engine said the agreement will expand its Google Book program to let online readers search for and buy copyrighted and out-of-print books in whole or page-by-page. Google will also provide U.S. libraries with free access to the database.

Google was sued in 2005 by the Author's Guild, Pearson Plc's Penguin unit, McGraw-Hill Cos., John Wiley & Sons Inc. and CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster subsidiary. They claimed the digitizing process infringed their copyrights on a massive scale. The project, started in 2004, includes Harvard University, the New York Public Library and about 10,000 publishers.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, said the program will create a new market for out-of-print books.

``The preliminary approval order sends a highly positive initial message,'' Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, said in an e-mailed statement. ``This agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form.''

Book Sales

Under the settlement, authors and publishers will have final say on whether their copyrighted works may be used by the program, and thus essentially allow online purchases to compete with book sales, David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said last month.

The deal provides that Google will keep 37 percent of revenue from online book sales and for advertisements that run next to previews of book pages, passing on the remainder to the Books Registry, which will keep an administrative fee and leave the rest for the copyright holders to collect. Google won't share advertising that runs along search results that include links to book-preview pages.

The cases are The Author's Guild v. Google Inc., 05cv8136 and McGraw-Hill Cos. v Google Inc., 05cv8881, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

To contact the reporters on this story: David Glovin in Manhattan federal court at dglovin@bloomberg.net; Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 18, 2008 10:46 EST