There are some exciting developments over at Google Books for anyone interested in downloading or publishing Creative Commons (CC) books. CC rightsholders can now use Google’s massive Books platform to distribute their books, while the public is able to download the publications directly off the Google Books site for free.
 
Xian Ke, associate product manager, Google Books, said in a blog post, “People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup--say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.”
 
All CC books are marked by their appropriate license on the right, while the PDF download button is situated at the top right hand corner on the appropriate page.
At this stage though Google does not make it easy to find CC licensed books, since there is no way to search for only CC books, neither is there a page on Google Books that aggregates CC titles.
 
Publishers that want to distribute their CC licensed books should sign up to Google Books’ Partner Program, or change their account settings if already a partner.