Winer thinks we should wait for publishers to tell us about their books, and not index them as Google wants to:

The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out.

To use the example he brings up - iTunes - had Apple let the RIAA folks do this one, then we would still be waiting for a service, and paying $5 a song when it finally rolled out with DRM that would make the Apple system look like an OSS playground. There's also this, from Wired - not all authors are on board with the publishers on this one:

Google's plan to scan library book collections and make them searchable may be drawing ire from publishers and authors' advocates, but some obscure and first-time writers are lining up on the search engine's side of the dispute -- arguing that the benefits of inclusion in the online database outweigh the drawbacks.

"A cover does sell a book to a certain extent, but once you're intrigued by a cover you want to dig deeper," said Meghann Marco, whose first book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, was published in May.

Some authors think that - wait for it - making their books easier to find will help sales. What a shocker! Winer's hatred of "bigCorps" (unless they have big checks) is blinding him here.

Here's the thing - Google already indexes copyrighted works - everything we write on the web is copyrighted, so far as I know (IANAL). Google crawls that stuff (as do the other search engines) and indexes it all, making content easier to find. What they propose to do here is the same thing, but with books that tend not to exist in an easily searchable form. Ultimately, if it all works out, it'll be easier to find books I might be interested in, and easier to buy them as well. Should we require opt-in for indexing of the web, too? The way it works now is opt-out via robots.txt. Does Winer propose that we reverse that? If not, why not? By Winer's *cough* argument *cough*, our rights are being violated as we speak....