Sort of. The difference is Gutenberg is entirely public domain texts, where Google is providing restricted access to copyrighted work.

I suppose they make money off it by placing highly targeted ads and/or through an affiliate agreement. When you bring up a text, there are links to buy it on the left-hand side.

Google has always been pretty secretive about how they make money, but obviously they’re doing OK.

I noticed today when I was playing with it that basically any time I read more than about three pages it made me enter a phrase that it displayed graphically. It used viruses and spyware as an excuse. That’ll defeat a lot of those types of programs by verifying it is a human reading it. I also noticed it seemed to be leaving pages out at random.

And I wonder if the legal challenges had something to do with Google issuing that stock to raise $6 billion or whatever it was recently? That gives them a nice war chest. As long as Fair Use isn’t declared unconstitutional I think Google has a case.

I’m sure all of the powers that be who believe big business is infallible are going to agonize mightily over this one. What we have now is a showdown between old big business and new big business. And I think the only companies who stand a chance of winning a fundamental copyright war these days are Google or Microsoft. And of course Microsoft isn’t gonna fight it–the more onerous copyright law becomes, the more money they stand to make. That leaves Google.

The problem they’ll have is those with nefarious purposes in mind. Google Print allows you to print pages of a book, up to .. ten, I think, from each book. However, there’s already software floating about that basically annihilates Google’s method of tracking your page count, and allows you to print an entire book straight to PDF.

That could be problematic.

(First response is – do tracking server side by IP address. Unfortunately, many large companies and schools use a single proxy server for their outside access. Of course would all the same people be looking at the same book? grumble. That’s why I don’t work at Google. :))