Google and The Author’s Guild have reached a settlement on digital books, but not everyone is happy.

Search Google Books today and you will be searching through more than 10 million books, scanned by the company from libraries around the world. At first, this seems like a marvelous concept – something that would be cherished the world over. Now anyone, practically anywhere, can discover all the richness of a library without leaving her personal computer. It would seem to be a book lover’s dream come true.

But for many, it’s a nightmare.

The problem for some isn’t that such an archive is being created. What they’re worried about is the single commercial entity creating it and the possible motives they might have.

In 2005, The Author’s Guild of America and Association of American Publishers launched a class action suit against Google. The two sides have since reached a controversial settlement, which amounts to Google agreeing to pay $125 million for the rights to digitize and sell every book in the United States.

According to The Author’s Guild, writers who make themselves known to the Book Rights Registry (a body representing the interests of U.S. copyright holders) will be entitled to receive a payment in the region of $60 per book as their compensation in the suit.

But not everyone is happy. One of the larger, more vocal opponents of the settlement is the Open Book Alliance – a collection of various parties, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo. The Alliance wants to promote fair and flexible systems aimed at achieving a more open process of mass digitizing, grounded in sound public policy with the long-term benefit of consumers rather than an isolated commercial interest in mind.

Very recently, well-known authors including Jeffrey Archer, Quentin Blake, Louis de Bernières, Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, Michael Chabon, Philip Pullman, Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Zadie Smith, and Jeanette Winterson opted out of the Google Book settlement, as did the estates of Rudyard Kipling, TH White, James Herriot, Nevil Shute, and Roald Dahl.

The Author’s Guild claims that not a single author would benefit by removing themselves from the class. They state that opting out is for authors who want to preserve the right to sue Google themselves, something they don’t think many are going to do. Indeed, considering the amount of money involved in such a case, very few authors could afford it.

However, Cory Doctorow, a long-time advocate of giving digital copies of his novels away for free, is still concerned about the monopoly Google would have. “Thanks a lot, Author’s Guild,” he states in a Boing Boing article on April 17, 2009. “With friends like you, who needs piracy?”

In that same article, Doctorow says that, “no one, not Google, not Santa Claus, should have this kind of leverage over the entire world of literature. It’s abominable. No one benefits when markets consolidate into a single monopoly gatekeeper – not even the gatekeeper, who is apt to lose its edge without competition to keep it sharp.”

So, as the back and forth debates continue over the possibility of a single corporate entity gaining a potential monopoly in digitized literature, authors, publishers, and creators continue to watch with baited breath, as confused about what it all means as ever.

As for me, I’m going to continue contemplating this while I listen to the Rush album 2112. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. Lyricist Neil Peart acknowledged Ayn Rand (author of Anthem) in the liner notes to the album, a futuristic tale about a single ruling power that controls “all the gifts of life” – in other words, all literature, music, and art.