A Google spokesman said the company regretted that The Authors Guild had chosen to sue rather than continue discussions.
"Google Print directly benefits authors and publishers by increasing awareness of and sales of the books in the program," Google said in a statement. "Only small portions of the books are shown unless the content owner gives permission to show more."
A year ago Google began working with five of the world's libraries -- at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library -- to make large parts of their book collections searchable on the Web.
The action by the 86-year-old Authors Guild is part of a push by the organization to roll back efforts by Web sites to make the contents of books freely available online.
In a related case, the group has been seeking for a decade to force online publishers from New York Times Co. to Amazon.com to pay royalties to writers whose stories appear in online databases without their consent.
In August Google said it planned to temporarily scale back plans to make the full text of copyrighted books available on its Internet site.
I've used Google Print, and liked it, yet the question is whether Google Print is actually harming authors or helping them. In the end, I imagine the Author's Guild and Google will come up with some ASCAP or BMI type of royalty scheme, based on click-through counts. All this can be worked out, I'm sure, using digital technology. It's only money...
