I cursed and gaped. I closed and reopened the web site and there it all was again, three years of work, plus debt and lack of medical care and some rather bizarre house-sitting to save on rent while I finished the manuscript on a small advance, with the promise of rewards in proportion to the book's sales. Now the book was being given away for free in Yale Divinity School Library, which is open to the general public. Unable to believe that this wasn't a special Yale subscription, I checked on my laptop, which is not registered or networked with Yale: there the book was again. Anyone with an internet connection could read the whole thing, courtesy of Google. 

The publisher had no idea how this had happened. Maybe this is how Google retaliates when an author demands that a book be removed, or maybe it was just a mistake. (By the evening, no pages were shown.) But what do I do about it? Sue Google? How do you even talk to anyone at Google? I looked around the internet and sent emails when I began to write about the company, and was generously referred here and there. Of course, I asked my publisher why Google was flaunting my whole book, but it just might be that anyone responsible for anything that happens at Google is more inaccessible than the Saudi royal house to a Western journalist asking about progress of Saudi women towards the right to drive. 

It is easy to get stuck in flabbergasted and fuming mode over Google's behaviour and not consider that the company is behaving entirely rationally. Its marketing (or rather, post-marketing) formula — fabulously successful so far, especially where music is involved — is that content is fuel. The strategy is more or less explicitly laid out in Chris Anderson's book, Free. 

If Google wanted to sell books, as Amazon or Barnes and Noble do, it would sell books, but that would be the dumb, boring, old-economy game, with money-making limited by supply and demand in the realm of real goods. Google makes its money from selling ads. More books not sold, more people flitting between more free displays or free library orders mean more page hits and more ad revenue. For a consumer to order a book from Amazon, turn off the computer, and sit down and read it through, without any enticements in front of him to order Viagra or find out his credit rating or search for long-lost classmates, is the last thing Google wants. 

Google books is carefully designed to train readers to treat books in the way most profitable for Google, as an undifferentiated mass of very briefly interesting enticements — which is largely what music has become in the age of 97 per cent illegal downloads. The brilliance of the strategy, as with music, is that the prophecy of legitimately free content will quickly fulfill itself: without ownership rights, with no claim to a share in whatever money they generate, creators of content can't spend enough time on it or compete with each other properly. They can't hope to create anything worth money. Older creators can hang on, still make money (in music, it is through concerts, and perhaps the reading circuit will revive for writers), but for the youngsters there will be no answer to Google's assertion, hidden under cant about "choice" and "access" and "opportunity", that they deserve nothing but to work for free for Google. They won't be good enough to do anything else.