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It’s a tougher read than ‘Ulysses’, and more complex than ‘The Da Vinci Code’, but the Google book settlement will have a massive impact on authors’ futures, writes ROSITA BOLAND.

FITTINGLY, THE unwiped blackboard in the lecture theatre at the Royal College of Surgeons, where some 35 people gathered on Monday for a seminar on the Google book settlement, is covered with complex algorithms. Or, at least, I think they are algorithms. At the end of the three-hour session, which has been organised by Poetry Ireland, all I know is that these scribbled mathematical sequences left behind from some other class are at least as complex to the average lay person as the ramifications of the Google book settlement are to me.