Reading in cyberspace is definitely my mother's dream. She always asks me if there is a way to read real books over the Internet for free. You see people these days are lazy and they don't even want to walk to their local library to borrow a few books. Google recently started the Google Book Search project which scanned 50,000,000 books and posted them on the Internet for everyone. Like many other Google services, it's totally FREE!

When my mother heard this, she was very excited. She got the website and explored the service before she found out she could only view "snippets" of her favourite copyrighted books. Of course, a week after Google started scanning copyright material without "permission", the Author's Guild and the American Association of Publishers sued them. Their argument was that Google used their copyrighted material as a mean of "profit" and didn't ask "permission" for that.

The case is still unresolved because the "fair use" argument questions the whole existence of search engines. Like Google Book Search, Yahoo, MSN, and Google itself offers an indexing of all the web pages on the Internet. They give the surfer a "snippet" of the web page without the web master's "permission" and therefore can be a violation to the copyright law. The webmaster has the ability to opt out of the indexing just like authors who have the right to opt out of the Google Book Search project. So if Google Book Search is somehow not "fair use", then does that mean search engines have to close down as well? Eventually, the court favoured Google and their "it's fair use" argument.

As for the overall effect of the "fair use" argument, I think the publishers just felt that Google should give them a part of its profit. The publishers left feeling empty because they didn't get "a piece of the pie" from Google Book Search. Google can after all give publishers a part of their profit and the whole argument wouldn't exist in the first place, but why do so when they can avoid it? I don't think the publishers are much of a threat to Google. Google is the world's number one search engine after all. It has wealth, power and many people respect its indexing service.

Google Book Search is not really a threat to public libraries because they offer full view of copyrighted materials. Unlike Google Book Search, they have the physical books themselves. Google Book Search only gave "snippets" of copyrighted books. The books in which its copyright is out of date is actually out of date itself. There is a reason why those copyrighted materials were not renewed - mostly because no one reads them now. So Google is actually helping the library by giving the user a chance to preview the book before they borrow it from the library.

Of course, if the library doesn't have it, the user will be forced to buy the book. Google Book Search can be seen as a way of previewing books.