My book Small Pieces Loosely Joined is now a part of Google Books. Because the publisher owns the copyright, you can only see a few pages of it, but I think it’s very cool — you can search for a term and read the pages it’s on, for example — and I wish more of it were on line. In fact, given that it has virtually stopped selling, I wish all of it were on line. That doesn’t quite align with the publisher’s interests, but someone’s going to figure out a way to make this work. What a boon!

For example, for $100 a year, I’d subscribe to Google Books as a research tool, with some reasonable restrictions (no massive print outs? relatively few complete book read-throughs?) and let Google divvy up the royalties. Or you can come up with a better idea. Please! [Tags: google books libraries copyright publishing]

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