The New York Times reports that Google Print for Libraries is being challenged by the American Association of University Presses:

How long is a snippet? That is one
of more than a dozen questions directed
at Google Inc. this week by the
executive director of the Association
of American University Presses, the
trade group representing university
presses. At issue is whether Google
Print for Libraries, the company’s
plan to digitize the collections of
some of the country’s major university
libraries, infringes the copyrights
of the authors of many books
in those collections. The program
will allow users to search the contents
of books, displaying context-specific
“snippets” of the texts of
copyrighted works.

In a letter to Google
dated Friday, the details of which
were first reported by BusinessWeek
on Monday, Peter Givler, executive
director of the press association, said
that Google Print for Libraries “appears
to involve systematic infringement
of copyright on a massive
scale.” Mr. Givler said the service
has “the potential for serious financial
damage” to the members of the
press association, a collection of
largely not-for-profit businesses that
typically produce and sell scholarly
works of nonfiction that have relatively
little commercial potential. In
a statement, Google said that it has
an “active dialogue with all of our
publishing partners,” adding that it
protects the copyright holders by allowing
users of Google Print to view
only a few short sentences of protected
text.

Both sides seem to be screwing up here. Google owes the university publishers the same respect it has shown to commercial houses; trying to do this without their cooperation is crazy. At the same time, though, university presses put out thousands of volumes that no one reads. The sales numbers I’ve heard for good academic books are tiny; I can’t imagine what happens to the bad ones. That’s why I think making volumes accessible to search is a fantastic way to increase sales — if it’s done right.