The US Justice Department has sent Google Inc a formal notice saying that antitrust investigators are checking out the company's settlement with authors and publishers - a deal which would facilitate Google's plan of making millions of digitized books available online!

On Wednesday, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond confirmed to reporters that the company was in receipt of the notice. Drummond further said that antitrust regulators "are generally trying to understand the settlement" with authors and publishers, and that the company was "in the process" of giving an appropriate response to request made by the Justice Department, pertaining to the information about the aforesaid deal.

A formal information request by the Justice Department has also been sent to Lagardere's Hachette Book Group and another publisher.

As per the terms of the deal in question, - which was signed in October last year, between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers - Google would shell out nearly $125 million for the creation of a Book Rights Registry, which would allow authors and publishers to get their works registered and receive monetary rewards from institutional subscriptions or book sales.

Such a settlement, according to Drummond, would not only give authors and publishers a new source of revenue on out-of-print books, but also provide to millions of readers the access to out-of-print titles.