Google's promise is to revive and sell my book, but it's challenging to see how this can be done, with or without page display, and the system seems designed to do the opposite. There are links to booksellers below the title and (blank, brown) cover of Other Places, but of course none of these booksellers have copies. In contrast, the "Find in a library" button led me to the Yale library system (I'm a visiting scholar at Yale, and was working on a Yale computer), with its interlibrary loan facility, where I was invited to register. I quickly did so and requested the book. The request was refused, because it turns out that Yale owns a copy. I ordered free delivery to the library I work in, and the copy arrived within 24 hours. I have it on my desk now. I had planned to revise and republish it, after arguing to a publisher that used copies were going for up to $200 on eBay. They aren't any more. I wonder why.

Two medical books that I co-edited on a work-for-hire basis for a European-based pharmaceutical company appeared (also with blank covers) under my name, as if I had rights to them, though I was only a consultant. They weren't available through the booksellers listed or through Yale libraries or interlibrary loan. These books belong to a series summarising all of the peer-reviewed scientific allergy research in the world, and the company produces, copyrights and distributes them on its own. It's a mystery who gave permission for the titles to go into Google books looking as if they're American, and mine, and out of print. But it's a certainty that the books' mission, and the cause of knowledge in general, are not being served by their appearance on this web page.

Three of my four in-print American books are from a single publisher. From each of these three books, 20 per cent of the pages were on display continuously from the beginning of the book. The fourth book had a 20 per cent display, but only some were in continuous series. Again, the easy library option put me in doubt that this was a way to sell books. 

I asked both my American publishers to remove my books from the programme on the grounds that the contracts don't allow for this kind of use without my consent, and that the "Find in a library" facility was a deadly difference from Amazon.com's displays. The editor of the first three books stalled and eventually offered to have the page display removed, but only in exchange for my signature on an ebook contract that my agents and I had already rejected three times. The contract was appended to the editor's email ultimatum. 

The editor of the fourth book, my recently published Aeneid translation, which is selling well, readily agreed to have the page display removed from Google books but said that this might take a while. When I checked two weeks later, 100 per cent of the book was on display, scrollable from the now pathetic-looking copyright page to the end of the glossary — 308 pages, and the back cover.