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>That's basically my take. But OTOH for a case like VFP it might help reach out to more people, at the cost of denying some income to you guys (I know the TON of money you made). I don't like the idea of circumventing copyright. I know Google had some legal issues on this.
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I would have been glad to release the Hacker's Guide under a wiki or something similar a while ago, but we weren't able to work out a mechanism that satisfied all parties. Google may have done that for us.

>I had not read up on the issue and do not know if Whil (the publisher) had to allow them to do this or they go about it unnanounced. It is a thorny issue.

Google told published to opt-out, rather than in. There was a participatory program as well, and I believe Whil supplied them with files. As far as contractual issues go, Whil is well within his rights under our contract. IANAL and all that.

It is tricky, and Google is taking a lot of heat for it, claiming they can offer excerpts (in my tests, I was limited to about 5 pages, but found the citation I was looking for). The image is in the background, and can't be grabbed with "Save As..." nor printed to paper or PDF. You can image-grab the entire browser window, of course.

In the end, we may just conclude that Google bungled the PR for a great new feature. Time will tell.