Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

I've been thinking about Google's book search for a while. In a sense, it's good for authors. Readers get a chance to see whether a book will be useful for them, so it's a promotional tool.

On the other hand, it's bad because authors have no control over how much of their book is actually visible online. Google controls all that.