How can the out-of-print books constitute any percentage of the books in print? It’s like saying old cats make up about 70 percent of kittens.

Dangerous monopolies aren’t erected over night, but are part of a gradual process of people turning the other way as companies accrue an insufferable amount of power. It’s hard for me to understand how you can claim that Google isn’t getting a monopoly on digital books, when that’s exactly what they have negotiated for. Check out this Wired fact if you want to hear it from someone besides me.

To compete with Google, another large corporation would have to provoke a class-action lawsuit with the publishers guild and then negotiate the same sort of settlement. It would also have to overcome Google’s “most favored nation” clause, which forbids publishers to negotiate a sweeter deal with anyone besides Google. This is highly improbable.

You are right that Google isn’t selling books yet. You’re wrong that they won’t be doing so in the future, they’ve explicitly said they will (see Wired fact). And it’s true that the charge that Google will alter search results is completely speculative–I noted that in the piece–but the fact that they will have the potential to censor literature based on search availability is apparent and eerie.

I hate to paint doomsday scenarios, in fact it’s something I almost always avoid. But I just can’t validate a wait-and-see approach in a situation like this. Yes, digitizing books is a great idea, but why should Google by the sole force allowed to do so. I think that’s a very dangerous idea.

Google is not getting any kind of monopoly on these books, and the books that google is wanting to digitize the most are orphaned out of print books with little commercial value. It is far more disturbing to me that a book becomes unavailable to the world because a publisher can’t make a buck on it than google wanting to make sure that if it pays for the right to scan and display the book that some other company can’t come along and pay less for the same rights.

The idea that google would alter the books search ranking is purely speculative, and the author does not even say what the advantage of doing that would be. It is not as if Google is charging for viewing the scanned books.

I am probably more suspicious of giant corporations motives than most people, but I don’t see any evidence of anything nefarious here, in fact I am looking forward to using what will probably be the world’s largest electronic library.