Is "Google Print" the way to go??

There is probably no equal to Google when it comes to making life easier for netizens. Its epochal search engine,scholar,orkut,blogger,gmail, Google Talk, Google Earth are some of the services that i have used. Google Print is yet another gem in Google's crown! It aims to make most of the information that is available in the form of books available online and make it searchable. A very ambitious project indeed..and Google is already well on its way to doing this on a truly large scale. Google will have the electronic version of the books (may be parts) in its cache and the database is searched based on your query. It then shows books whose pages have stuff related to your query. Ofcourse, you get to see only 1/2 pages around the relevant part of the text. Now, does it help??.. Hell Yes!.. How many times have you chosen a book after you read a wonderful preface or a lucid discussion of a particular topic? I have ended up buying many books after very brief (extremely brief in some cases) encounters with them. Google Print would be the idea place to lurk around and make such "light bulb"(taken from sowmya) decisions to buy a book. To add to all this, you can search for the book in the libraries near you! (I guess only US libraries are searchable, as of now)

By now, You must be wondering whether the publishers would agree to all this. From whatever I see, some top publishers are certainlty co-operating with Google. But legal issues continue to hamper Google Print. It is indeed a tricky thing for a publisher. The entire book is going to be available in another company's servers!! All that you need is a leak from some employer of Google.. the whole of internet would be filled with electronic copies of the latest books! This is indeed dangerous. I just hope that Google and the publishers thrash out the details and put necessary safegaurds in place. A fully functional Google Print would certainly be a great luxury to have!