Google Print and Copyright

One of the recent stories to catch my attention is the lawsuit by the Authors Guild against Google for the Google Print program. I won't get into any legal details as other sites can present them such as Groklaw in much better detail. However the ramifications are great and many. I have no doubt this lawsuit may eventually go to the Supreme Court to decide what is fair use. The argument is essentially the difference between how much use is fair use. The Authors Guild contends any attempt to make a copy even if the public information displayed is short snippets violates copyright. Google contends the copy is private and allowed under copyright while the public information is only short snippets allowed by the fair use provisions of copyright. I believe if Google could obtain the short snippets through other means than copying the book digitally, the Authors Guild would not make this fuss. I also believe the Authors Guild is concerned about the amount of people accessing snippets from the book. Never before has a medium allowed for millions of people to find any snippet in the book they are wanting. We always had to take the snippets offered by the publishers, reviewers and authors and buy the book to judge its content. Now we may be able to obtain these snippets quickly and can judge the content for ourselves. I believe this scares publishers and book distributors as much as copying the book. I've always hated reviews which just quote a few words from books. You are never able to understand even the most basic context and need to rely on the reviewer for any insight. I have always adored publishers who add a couple pages to the end or beginning in a book about another book they are promoting. It gives you a feel for how the book is written and the content you may expect from the book. Google Print does much less than provide a page or two about the content. They only provide at most a paragraph and at least a couple of lines. In the end Google is trying to provide people with another resource about the content of printed materials. They are allowing us to view short snippets from a huge collection of books and asking us to evaluate the content. I think Google Print will allow people to more accurately evaluate whether a book may fill our needs or not.