Tom Gatti: The reader's view

Increasingly, we expect knowledge and entertainment — highbrow or low — at our fingertips. If we are struck with a burning desire to read, say, Robert Browning’s verse novel The Ring and the Book, we don’t want to have to hunt through our shelves in search of the battered OUP edition that we bought secondhand at university, only to remember, after overturning the sitting room, that we lent it to our sister last year, and now she is in Thailand, and the nearest library is only open on Wednesday afternoons, and the Waterstone’s on the high street got rid of its poetry section in 1997.

Google Books, in scanning the entire text of out-of-print works to be read onscreen or in some cases download, is undoubtedly doing readers a favour. In a few seconds, a few clicks, we could be tucking in to 21,000-line Victorian poems — or whatever takes our fancy.

This ultra-convenience can only be a good thing, right? Well, yes. But let’s not get too excited. For a start, this new deal affects only US readers. Stuck in Blighty, for the foreseeable future we have to make do with the current Google Books set-up, which has a huge database but very little readable content.

Second, many out-of-print and out-of-copyright books are freely available, and have been for years, through Project Gutenberg — a heroic enterprise set up in 1971, in which volunteers type up whole works and make them freely available online in plain text form.

Third, my choice of the arcane The Ring and the Book was not pure flippancy: the majority of titles covered by this deal are likely to be pretty obscure.

If you’re picturing an online Utopia in which you can freely graze Dan Brown’s latest opus, or even Martin Amis’s 1973 debut, you need to adjust your set.

In the long run, readers will benefit from Google Books. But it is not the only project spreading online knowledge, nor is it likely ever to be the one-size-fits-all, one-stop-shop global library that it aspires to be.

Roger Boyes: The writer's view

One outraged publisher uses an elegant simile for the Google bonus. It is, to paraphrase him a little, like a burglar cleaning out your flat and letting you know later that he was flogging your Bang & Olufsen sound system.

Not for me it isn’t. The resuscitation of out-of-print books is more like a thick burglar taking that ragged flea-bitten sofa left behind by your ex, putting it in the back of his white van, selling it to a sucker on eBay and splitting the profits with you. Bring it on, I say. Bring on Google, the deaf-and-dumb larcenist.

The fact is, some books are doomed from the outset to go out of print. They are the publishing equivalent of the yesterday’ — newspaper-as-fish-and-chip-paper syndrome. Everybody in the business knows this the moment that the ink is dry on the contract. Don’t ask me about the publishing economics that underpin such deals; perhaps they are just about establishing a presence, showing the world that you haven’t fallen asleep in the club.

Thirty years ago I wrote a not-bad book with Simon Freeman called Sport Behind the Iron Curtain. It quickly landed in bookshop Siberia, just below 1001 Best Golf Jokes. A few years later I wrote a book about the transition from communism to capitalism that, if published six months earlier, would have been prophetic but which actually came out in 1990 when everyone had revolution fatigue.

Both books, needless to say, are out of print and apart from a few quotes in academic works — I track them down on Google Scholar, on wet Sunday afternoons — may as well be pulped and made into biofuel for the Third World. They have been, until this special day, dead paper. So please can I sign on the dotted line? There may yet be some life in the mangy works yet. And the sign-up fee will pay for a subscription to the TLS. Note to burglar: the garden door is always left off the latch.

Roger Boyes has recently published Meltdown Iceland (Bloomsbury) about the financial crisis