Google, which has been revolutionizing how surfers use the Web for years, is rocking the Net again with its new Google Book Search, which allows surfers to do full-text searches on copyrighted volumes, under certain restrictions by publishers, and on public domain material in an unrestricted manner; readers can also download and print out PDFs of works in the public domain.

Publishers are worried about losing control of their works, according to Book Business, and

have raised issue with the search’s display of portions of copyright-protected works without prior approval…

The Mountain View,Calif-based company contends the search constitutes fair use and offers publishers the opportunity to request how and if their content will be used.

According to Google, the company does “not enable downloading of any books under copyright. Unless we have the publisher’s permission to show more, we display only basic bibliographic information, and, in many cases, small snippets of text - at most, a few lines of text surrounding a search term.”

An article in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune outlines some of the worries of the major publishers, who’ve seen how Napster and the iPod have rattled the music industry and are hoping to head off similar chaos in the book biz while they still can:

There is no hit device for reading books electronically, nor is there a place to go online to browse or download an unbeatable selection of books. There is, however, a keen awareness among publishing executives that this day will come - and that they need to shape, rather than be shaped by, developments.

There is a new device, however, with the potential to become that hit: Sony has just launched the Sony Reader, a beautiful — if limited — toy that could evolve into the iPod for books. The price will have to be lower — the Reader retails for $350 — as will the cost of the downloadable books, which are barely cheaper than their hard-copy versions. More on my wishlist for the Reader: a nonproprietary format — it can already read PDF files, which is good, but I’m not gonna spend $350 for something that can’t read all e-books.

We’re on the edge of an exciting time for publishing — scary, perhaps, for the big corporations, which are about to lose their near-exclusive channel for distributing books, and crazy, definitely, for readers, as competing efforts to digitize the world’s library butt heads. We’ll see mishmashes of incompatible formats and duplicated effort before it all settles down into something genuinely useful. Google is already embroiled in lawsuits and legal spats with publishers and rival e-corps, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Google Inc. will subpoena information from Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to help fight copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning project.

Google, the world’s most-used search engine, is seeking information on rival projects by the companies, including book lists, costs, estimated sales, dealings with publishers and possible benefit or harm to copyright owners, according to papers filed in U.S. District Court in New York.

In the end, it can only be readers who will benefit, as we get access to more and more diverse material than we ever have before (I discussed how absolutely thrilling this is for readers in a post this past spring at my blog Geek Philosophy). Google Book Search’s official blog, Inside Google Book Search, offers a hint about how wide-ranging reader interest is, and how it has not been fully served by the severe limitations of traditional publishing: it took a look at the zeitgeist of what readers are searching for, bookwise, online… and it’s not, surprisingly, all John Grisham and Harry Potter:

[H]ere’s our list of most-viewed English language books supplied by our publisher partners for the week of September 17th through 23rd:

  • Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers
  • Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms
  • Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk
  • Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion
  • The Holy Qur’an
  • Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006
  • Hegemony Or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
  • Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage
  • Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense
  • Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot

Wow. Who knew there were so many topics we didn’t know we needed to read all about?

(Technorati tags: )