From Reuters:
The bottom line on Book Search is that if you want to construct doomsday scenarios about how Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin will partner with Dr. Evil to suddenly shut off our access to hundreds of years of knowledge, you can. But nothing we know about Google or about the book business gives us any indication we should expect that. A more likely scenario is that Google will give away so much of its content for free that, even after giving them 63 percent of its revenue, it may well return too little to writers and publishers. That would still leave the creators of the millions of out-of-print books that Google is scanning more than they get from their work now (zero!), but it would mean that eventually many will desert for better options.
We can worry about that when we get to it. Right now, though, it’s not Google that’s standing in the way of the advance of human knowledge. It’s the Google bashers. Folks like Darnton might be worried about the effects that concentrating power in Google’s hands will have on public access to books, but ask yourself this: In the past decade, who has done more for public access to knowledge. Harvard? Or Google? If you want to pick sides in this debate, that’s what really tells you everything you need know.