Don’t listen to dystopian monopoly-mongers.

In 1885, the city of Khartoum, the British-held capital of what is now Sudan, fell to Islamic revolutionary Mohamed Ahmad, known to his followers, who believed him to be the last in a line of prophets stretching back to the beginning of Islam, as the Mahdi. When he was asked to judge a difficult case or listen to a wrenching story, the Mahdi would weep. His enemies claimed that his tears were a trick, accomplished by putting pepper on his fingertips so he could brush his eyes and sob at will.

This is the kind of story that you might find in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, but in fact it comes from the journals of Charles Gordon, a British general who died in the battle for Khartoum. The memoirs have been out of print for many years, but I know the story because I have been reading Gordon's diaries online, thanks to Google Book Search.

There are a hundred other gems like the story of the Mahdi's peppered fingertips in Gen. Gordon's diary alone, and hundreds of millions of facts are now being uncovered and made accessible by Google's extraordinary project of digitizing millions of books. But these days, when you read about Google Books, you hardly ever-well, never-get to read anything as lively as those kinds of facts and insights. No, what you get, over and over again if you've followed the saga of Google Books, is the story of all the folks fighting The Coming Google Monopoly.

The meme of the Google book monopoly has been gathering force over the last months, after being given a push by Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard's library system. Darnton was originally one of the most prominent backers of Google's digitization initiative. But somewhere along the line, Darnton got cold feet. In February, he wrote an essay for the New York Review of Books in which he set out the case that thanks to Google Book Search, Google will enjoy "a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information." Since Darnton's essay appeared, the anti-Google crusade has gathered steam, fed by Google-bashing advocacy groups like Consumer Watchdog, and the hue and cry has sparked a federal antitrust inquiry.

In the dystopian vision of the Google critics, Google Books threatens to leave human knowledge at the mercy of a dark power that will ratchet up the price of digital editions of books while running roughshod over the rights of authors, publishers, and readers. So far, nothing that Google—whose business model is based mainly around giving people information for free—has done would make you think that Google plans to do anything but maximize access to its library. But it can, and in every dystopia everything bad that can happen will happen.

Some critics, led by Darnton, argue that Google Books threatens to develop a stranglehold on human knowledge and use it to gouge consumers. Others—such as literary agent Lynn Chu, in this Wall Street Journal op-ed—contend that Book Search will rip off writers and publishers. And a few, such as Consumer Watchdog, try to argue that Book Search will both charge too much and give authors and publishers too little. None of this is true.