Google's enormous library will make publishers and authors beholden to only one all-powerful player. This sounds plausible in theory but utterly misrepresents the facts on the ground when it comes to publishing. There already is one dominant player in the book business: It's Amazon, and publishers are uniformly terrified of its growing power. By including a library of books that Amazon doesn't have, Google Book Search may at some point present an alternative go-to source for book buyers and create a counterweight to Amazon. This is what just about everyone in the book business really wants.
From The Big Money/Slate.
The original critique by Robert Darnton.
