Just on a whim, after seeing all the commentary and news releases on Google Print, I entered “Henry Melton” into the search engine and found that, indeed, one of my works has been scanned into the print search engine. They’ve been talking about all the public domain works that have been entered, but there are a few publishers who’ve authorized their catalogs as well. With all the writer’s organizations up in arms against the system, I’ve been of two minds. More exposure can only be a good thing for my writing career, but I can understand the problems with unauthorized publications.
So, finding my copyrighted story “The Christmas Count” which was part of the anthology Christmas Stars, I immediately attempted to see how much was being shown. At first, all I could see were things like the table of contents, but hitting the “More results from this book” link, I found seven full pages (out of the eleven page story) and one partial page. This is certainly more than the 20% advertised, but chopped up like it was, it would be impossible to fully read and understand the story.
I await more evidence before I can make up my mind on this issue. The search engine approach to paper publishing is far too valuable to be blocked out of hand, but it’s going to take some serious work to find the fair approach for all concerned. There’s the old saying, “You can’t grep dead trees.” But it looks like that’s all changing now.