Does anyone at all see a problem with this intellectual property issue?

One of my favorite environmental books ever is Katie Alvord's http://books.google.com/books?id=yVw0z-Vm1IAC&dq=Divorce+your+car&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=mCKnvwJksi&sig=RUYiITcRqCCtGDVc0lCLmAa3wmA&hl=en&ei=33LKSqqPM4HRlAeO7aySAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false">Divorce Your Car, which is a fine piece of analytical thinking and hard work in which Ms. Alvord carefully analyzes all of the assumptions and marketing underlying the car CULTure.

You will note however that Google has the full text on line and you can read the book for free.

I believe in the dissemination of information, but it seems to me that Ms. Alvord did not agree to work for free. In some sense some over paid executive expropriated her work and gave it away.

This doesn't seem just to me.

One retains one's copyright for one's life time, and one's heirs, for 50 years after one's death.

it's because they reached an agreement with her publisher.

http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/#3

Three types of books

This agreement helps define how our users may access different categories of books on Google Books.

In-copyright and in-print books
In-print books are books that publishers are still actively selling, the ones you see at most bookstores. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the "preview" and "purchase" models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.

In-copyright but out-of-print books
Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to "turn off" that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.

Out-of-copyright books
This agreement doesn't affect how we display out-of-copyright books; we will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as we do today.

And people could *GASP* read it for free?

I did, in fact, get it out of the library. :blush: I did read it for free.

I appears from the other posters here, that the issue has been addressed.

Most of my life - certainly when I was growing up - I didn't have access to a library, which means that I spent a lifetime building my own library. I paid, ultimately a lot of money, for a lot of books.

Even when I developed access to a public library, which happened when I bought my house, I didn't actually use it as much as I could have done.