I'm afraid I'm a bit busy to expand on this even in the typical, sorry fashion I do here on mfn, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say books.google.com is evil. Why? Because they've made the same deal with the devil/Mouse everyone else has. How? By providing absolute tons of pages from books that are out *today*. I'm endlessly impressed with how much of the books' previews I can tease out of the system.

Yet it's just enough that I want the books. I want to hold them, flip through them, possess them, if only temporarily.

That, of course, is exactly what the site's supposed to do... from Google's point of view and, more importantly, from the publishers' point of view. Sure, there are books that I got enough for free, defeating the purpose of previews/demos, there are many more were the advertisement worked.

Why is that evil? How is that evil? Because Google has lessened the practical impetus to let older books (but newer than those printed in 1923) into the public domain.

That's all I gots times for now, I'm afeared.