Book Worms?

Is anyone following the saga of Google Books, the Internet behemoth's controversial attempt to scan all out-of-print and orphaned books to make them available again to the world via the Web? I've only read about it in bits and pieces, so I'm open to hearing other, more-educated opinions on the subject. But the whole backlash against it sure sounds like a bunch of sour grapes. That book publishers are calling it infringement that Google is including snippets of copyrighted works is ridiculous. (Was a card catalog a copyright violation, too?) But it's the books that are no longer copyrighted that really gets me. It's like when your annoying neighbor threw his old bike out on the curb but then the garbage men didn't come right away. Then a few days later you decide to pull it out and clean it up and realize, "Hey, this thing isn't so shabby after all." You paint it, get some new tires, then add some really cool streamers and banana seat and suddenly it's the hottest bike in the neighborhood. Then your neighbor -- who wanted nothing to do with it a week ago -- is all-of-a-sudden pissed at you for "stealing" his bike.

OK, maybe not the best analogy. And yes, I should have made the guy who "stole" the bike the richest, most popular kid in the neighborhood who certainly doesn't need a free bike. But I don't understand why anyone would object to having books that would never been seen again suddenly available to millions of new readers. How COOL would it be to have every old book ever available again? (I'll bet those Tracy Austin books that were in my junior high library will wind up online!) Of course Google has a financial incentive for making this project work. But many things that are good for all of us have profit motives (not everyone can be Jonas Salk). And from what I understand, if the rightful owners of these works do come forward, they get paid and are afforded a cut of any future revenue. Sure, you could argue that it wasn't Google's in the first place to "share" with them. But that's missing the entire point. I'm the first to admit that it's getting scary how much of "the pie" Google has control of. But of all the things they've proposed -- and remember, they're the ONLY ones who have the means to take on this HUGE project (I read they've spent $5 million on scanning alone) -- this is the least offensive to me. Their knowing every single detail about me? That's another story all together.