I’ve just published a white paper on Google’s settlement with the publishing industry and its implications for future digital publishing business models.

As I’ve described previously, the settlement calls for the establishment of an independent Book Rights Registry, which will manage information about rights and royalties for book content sold through Google Book Search and other business models contemplated by Google and publishers for the future.

The big difference between the immediate business models set forth in the settlement and those contemplated for the future is that the former are based on page images while many of the latter are not (necessarily).  Publishers and service providers (including Google) will need to use logically structured XML content instead of scanned pages, which are used for the current Google Book Search.

This has lots of implications for all parties — but especially for publishers, which may need to build XML-based content architectures in order to provide content to new business models such as custom publishing and compilations.  The white paper, commissioned by XML server software maker Mark Logic, explores these implications and suggests some content architecture initiatives for publishers to investigate.