Unpublished and self-published authors have been drawn to the "Partner Programme" in large numbers, for the same reason garage musicians were drawn to Napster: they feel they have nothing to lose and they are promised significant exposure. But publishers have also quietly and routinely been giving permission for Google to display in-print books whose copyrights they hold, even though normal book contracts don't seem to allow publishers to make this decision on their own. But there is, in practical terms, nothing to stop them. Anyone can authorise himself to submit any number of books simply by ticking the box next to the words "I verify that I am the copyright holder or authorised by the copyright holder for the titles I plan to submit." 

When I clicked on the link in the Q&A and searched under my name, I found that all four of my in-print books were in the programme, the covers displayed down the left-hand side of the screen. Checking a few weeks later on Google book Search, I saw all five of my books, including the out-of-print one, Other Places, published in South Africa, for which all the rights have reverted to me. The cover was shown as blank and brown, and there were no inside pages displayed.

Google hopes to monetise such a book legally, even after failing to find the author or his heirs or other rights holders in order to get permission and pay royalties. (Most books of the past century require this treatment, as a book typically goes out of print in a couple of years, yet its copyright protection lasts for decades longer — in the US and the EU, this is now set at 70 years after the author's death.) 

For the proprietor of a super-duper web search engine, Google doesn't appear to be looking very strenuously for authors. My name on the front cover and the commercial unavailability of Other Places argue that I'm the obvious and only rights holder, yet nobody asked me for my consent to feature the title in Google books. And it's not that I'm hard to find: I just Googled myself and got 87,700 hits. I'm reminded of the scene in Shrek II in which the companions steal the clothes of a pair of travellers and promise to make amends — unless they can't find the men, or unless they forget. 

Google may also consider it unimportant that this is a foreign book, for which a US court can't conceivably assign any default rights (even if that court believed it could assign default rights to American books). Again, the book's status would be plain to anyone looking: the copyright page cites only a publisher and address in Johannesburg and other publishers would be noted on the internet if they were involved later. Not to give a hoot about foreign copyrights would make strategic sense for Google, as it is an excellent bet that a typical foreign rights holder would never know that the web giant was exploiting his book and would be unable to do anything if he did.