I think this is a great development for the sharing of knowledge. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, read up on it. It's a great way to share your academic content, get a greater audience for that content, and allow other to build on that content. You can do this all while retaining your copyright of the work.
Google Hopes Readers Can Download, Share, and Use Books
Authors who feared the expansion of Google Books' library, or who felt the company was hoarding books and filling its own coffers, now have a little less to worry about.
Google announced today that it will let authors use Google Books to distribute works that they have published under Creative Commons licenses. Readers will be able to download the copyrighted books and share them with other Google Books users as long as they comply with the authors' decisions on how the material can be used. (There are six different Creative Commons licenses, which let authors require, among other things, that their books can be repurposed only with attribution or only for non-commercial use.)
Nine books are already available to download, including Code: Version 2, by Lawrence Lessig, a director of Creative Commons, who is an advocate for open-access for books.
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