Andrew: True, Google should probably buy two or three copies of each book they index, at least when such books are available--that's how many copies they'll be keeping on their servers. We're talking, what, a couple of dollars in royalties? Remember, Google, unlike a library, won't let anybody read the book; they'll just quote a couple of sentences and link to a bookstore. They're an automated book reviewer (at least in their "30 words" incarnation), not a lending library.

It should be noted, though, that only a vanishingly tiny percentage of books in an average university library will still be in print. Once something drops into the backlist--especially 30 or 40 years into the backlist--it's frequently impossible to contact the author (without, perhaps, hiring a private detective). For every book that anybody remembers, there's a hundred more that sank without a trace. I want to search those books. I want to buy those books, used.

How much money would this pump into the backlist? In a good year, I spend thousands of dollars on books. Science fiction, technical manuals, you name it. I own almost every word our host has ever written, most of them in hardcover.

Serraphin: Book reviewers also quote ~30 words of your book, charge money for their reviews, and pay you no royalty. Sometimes they sell ads on the same page. Are you going to tell the New York Review of Books they're stealing, just because they quoted a couple of apt sentences in the course of their commercial venture?

With a little bit of organization on the part of authors (I know, I know), opt-out through COCOA could be as easy as looking up your ISBNs, verifying your identity, and calling it done. It could apply across Google, Amazon, and any future services. And such an opt-out process would allow the backlist to be indexed, which would never happen with any opt-in approach.