At the same time, efforts are taking place among publishers as well as other search companies to launch alternative book text search systems.

The legal actions are ostensibly about whether the copies that Google made of books by scanning them amounted to copyright infringement because it was done without permission. Google's position is that such actions should pass a court's test for fair use under US copyright law.

Fair use is based on a court's assessment of four guidelines. One of these is the effect the use has on the market for the content. It is clear enough that Google, by making book text easier to find and offering convenient links to purchase the books, is expanding rather than reducing the market for the indexed books.

Google is likely to get more hung up on another of the guidelines: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature. Google stands to benefit commercially from their use of book content, potentially including earning (directly or indirectly) cuts of profits from sales of books. If this happens, Google effectively becomes a major link in the book industry value chain. Major players in bookselling value chains tend not to exist without the blessing of the book publishing industry, and that's where the trouble in this case lies. Google Print is, as we have said before, really about publishers' maintenance of control over their products' marketing and distribution. Copyright infringement is more like a subterfuge than the real raison d'etre of the litigation.

Meanwhile, two other trends are emerging in this matter. First is the Open Content Alliance (OCA), co-founded by Google's arch-rival Yahoo. OCA is a more publisher-friendly alternative to Google Print, whose main difference is that it will index publishers' content on an "opt-in" basis rather than Google's "opt-out" basis (i.e., publishers must inform Google if they do not wish to have their books scanned and indexed). Microsoft's MSN announced on Tuesday that it is building MSN Book Search and joining Yahoo in the OCA. Other OCA contributors include the Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media (a technical publisher and prominent open-source advocate), and a number of academic institutions.

The other trend is that publishers are beginning to offer their own online text searching capabilities, particularly in Germany, where the Frankfurt Book Fair is taking place this week -- and where, among other countries, Google launched local-language versions of Google Print last week. Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, which owns Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, and other book imprints, is developing an online text repository of book content, to be called BookStore, that it will offer to other publishers as well as its own imprints. BookStore will provide marketing and e-commerce capabilities, the former including options to make text available to Google or Yahoo for indexing.

Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the German book publishers' trade association, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair that it is developing technology to enable publishers to index book text onto their own servers and enable others to search for text across all publishers. With this type of architecture, Google would be able to search the German publishers' network instead of scanning text into its own servers. The Börsenverein is in discussions with Google (and other search engines) about such an arrangement.

What does all this have to do with DRM? Simply this: Google Print is like a meta-DRM technology. It controls access to valuable content by hiding it behind search results, which make it available only a few lines at a time. Then if users want to see more, it can hand them off to another service to deal with that request -- perhaps to Amazon.com to purchase a hardcopy book, eReader.com to purchase an eBook, or Audible.com for a digital audiobook; in each case, Google is facilitating the purchase of a bundle of rights to the content through search results. This is analogous to what audio search engines like GoFish and Yahoo Audio Search are doing with respect to music services like iTunes and Napster, with the record companies' blessings. Draw your own conclusions.

Record companies have opted not to solve the dilemma of online content discoverability by themselves (for example, they divested themselves of the early joint ventures MusicNet and pressplay); instead, they have found productive ways to partner with online search and distribution vendors. The book publishing industry apparently thinks it can do the opposite and develop its own solutions. Judging by past history, publishers will have an uphill climb ahead of them to work amongst themselves to fend off Google.

One problem is that antitrust law constrains publishers from working together in certain ways. But beyond that, publishers tend to collaborate on online projects if technology vendors drive the development and if the projects are confined to tightly-bounded niche markets that only minimally threaten their existing lines of business. An illustrative example of this is ebrary. Ebrary, a privately held company, provides a tool for high school and college students to use in doing research for term papers online. It began life with funding from Adobe and three major book publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Random House, which contributed their content. The service now includes content from over 200 publishers, and the company recently expanded its offerings to trade book content and public libraries.

It's a long way from ebrary to Google. The former is a niche solution that yields incremental revenue for publishers and does not change their existing business models. Internet search is a fundamentally disruptive force; the tidal-wave impact of a technology like Google is impossible to fend off in its entirety. Publishers appear to understand this, judging from concerns they have raised that Google will end up "controlling culture" (instead of their editors doing so). Publishers will need to formulate a reasonable response to Google Print more quickly than they are wont to do. Internal experimentation is valuable but will not solve the problem by itself.

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