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Originally Posted by murraypaul
Sounds a lot like the argument that sharing copes of music tracks helps the artists because more people will discover them, and possibly buy an album, doesn't it?
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No, because a music track is a work of art whole in and of itself.
Unless I am missing something, Google Books is serving up quotations no longer than what you will find in reviews. A quote is not a work of art like a music track. If you are willing for a rave New York Times review to quote your book, you should also be willing for Google to offer quotes from it.
Some authors/publishers seem to think Google is like someone who downloads a pirated book and never reads more than snippets from it. The difference, I believe, is that employees at Google do not commonly read the books in their databases, and are surely forbidden to do so. By contrast, the only rational reason someone would download to their home computer is that they are planning to actually read the full text, or at least some artistically whole portion, such as a short story in a book of copyrighted short stories.