I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Google Books. As an IT professional, I love it. The more information I can get at my desktop, the better. And I'm also in graduate school, so I'm a student. I'll admit that I'm just as much a part of the if-I-can't-get-it-full-text-at-my-desktop-then-it-doesn't-exist student mentality that frustrates most librarians. So, from a research point-of-view this is great.
As a personal user of the information, I'm not so thrilled. I have a lot of trouble reading large amounts of text form a desktop screen, and I know I'm not in a minority on this. I'm not going to read a novel on my desktop. I have trouble even with small e-books with regard to this. And I'm certainly not going to print out 240+ pages to read it (although I can picture environmentally unconscious people doing this). Rather, I'm more likely to skim through it and decide whether I want to own a copy or get it from a library.
I'm certainly not opposed to putting full text documents on the web. In fact, I like to consider myself a pioneer in this area. Yes, that's right. As far back as 1994 I was involved with a project at Hanover College called the Hanover Historical Texts Project [1] which is actually still in existence if you want to follow the link. Myself and my fellow student works spent hours manually transcribing Old English documents and out-of-copyright authors like Petrarch and Dante to make transcripts of works. It's really not that different than Google Books, just that we didn't have the images to go with it. And it was extremely labor intensive. Ah, but just to think what could have happened if we could have turned that into a successful business model at the time. I could have been a Google guy!
Ok, maybe not. But the point is that I don't have the traditional fear that a lot of librarians have that Google Books is somehow going to cut into and undermine the mission of the library. My big beef with Google Books is just like with a lot of other things in the world - it's all about the money. Google is able to digitize and control this enormous flow of information because it has the money to throw at this project. Sure, this is not that different from the database vendors that libraries contract with to provide them with digital information, but somehow it is.
I think the issue that I've never been able to quite put my finger on is the sheer scale of the project. When finished, Google will have one of the largest (if not the largest) and most valuable collections of information available at any point in history (if they ever reach their objective). And I guess that what bothers me further is that this body of information lies with a for-profit company. And even though they claim to 'do no evil', maybe at some point they will. And that's a scary thought. Because they have no specific mandate to use this information for the betterment of the population and they could cut off access to it whenever they want. They can use it however they damn well please.