Don’t listen to dystopian monopoly-mongers.

So let's take on some of the myths that have been propagated about Book Search:

Google forces writers and publishers into an unfair deal that won't give them a fair share of what their work is worth. Let's deal with this one first, because it's the easiest to dispense with. The deal that Google signed with publishers gives copyright holders 63 percent of the revenue that Google takes in from their books. Very few authors and publishers might individually strike better deals than this one, and nothing in Google's agreement keeps them from doing that. But anybody who thinks that the majority of writers or small publishers could do better on their own than the deal for almost two-thirds of Google's book revenue that the publishing industry negotiated by acting in concert is living in dreamland.

Google will ratchet up the price of online content and make it inaccessible. Everything we know about Google indicates a clear preference for one price point: free. Darnton admits this but points out that this might change in the future. This is true-maybe even probable in the case of Book Search, which offers publishers and authors the chance to make money by selling books. Some will indeed sell for high prices, as they do now. But the notion that, in general, the books that publishers and authors cannot keep in print now will suddenly be available only at a cost that beggars consumers is bizarre. There are no profits in selling online access to today's out-of-print books for high prices-if there were, they wouldn't be out of print in the first place.

The public would be better served by a nonprofit database that guaranteed access to books at "reasonable" prices. In his NYRB essay, Darnton counts the failure to establish this kind of independent, noncorporate library as a big missed opportunity. The problem here is that, in practice, there is no assurance that what this independent authority would count as a reasonable price would be better than the price that Google is likely to charge. On the contrary, we already know that Google has the ability to come up with ad-driven business models that make "free" work; Darnton's hypothetical entity does not. Maybe more important, though, is that this kind of advance guarantee of reasonable prices really would trample the rights of writers and publishers who want to maximize how much they get for their work.

Writers or publishers who let Book Search scan their books give up the right to control how they are presented and sold forever. Even after Google has scanned their books, rights holders can at any time exclude them from Google's services. They can allow Google to display the whole book, excerpts, or nothing at all. The only right they lose if they accept the agreement that Google signed last year with associations of publishers and authors is the right to sue Google for copyright violations simply for adding their books to its electronic files. Google's critics have been spectacularly unsuccessful in getting actual writers or publishers to step up and explain how Google's efforts might harm them. The best that Consumer Watchdog could do was an e-mail from an unnamed "successful author" convinced that Google has already stolen his "valuable rights."

Google's enormous library will make publishers and authors beholden to only one all-powerful player. This sounds plausible in theory but utterly misrepresents the facts on the ground when it comes to publishing. There already is one dominant player in the book business: It's Amazon, and publishers are uniformly terrified of its growing power. By including a library of books that Amazon doesn't have, Google Book Search may at some point present an alternative go-to source for book buyers and create a counterweight to Amazon. This is what just about everyone in the book business really wants.

The bottom line on Book Search is that if you want to construct doomsday scenarios about how Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin will partner with Dr. Evil to suddenly shut off our access to hundreds of years of knowledge, you can. But nothing we know about Google or about the book business gives us any indication we should expect that. A more likely scenario is that Google will give away so much of its content for free that, even after giving them 63 percent of its revenue, it may well return too little to writers and publishers. That would still leave the creators of the millions of out-of-print books that Google is scanning more than they get from their work now (zero!), but it would mean that eventually many will desert for better options.

We can worry about that when we get to it. Right now, though, it's not Google that's standing in the way of the advance of human knowledge. It's the Google bashers. Folks like Darnton might be worried about the effects that concentrating power in Google's hands will have on public access to books, but ask yourself this: In the past decade, who has done more for public access to knowledge. Harvard? Or Google? If you want to pick sides in this debate, that's what really tells you everything you need know.