Publish: yes. Perish: no

There’s a book titled Gus the Great that I re-read every few years. Published in 1947, the novel was written by Thomas W. Duncan, who Time magazine called “a down-and-out ex-Harvard man.”

It’s the very engaging tale of a likable con man who runs a circus, and it made the author a dazzling $250,000 when it sold 750,000 copies and became a Book of the Month Club selection and a movie. The first thing the down-and-out Duncan bought was a new land-yacht of a Chrysler convertible, which is reason enough to admire him.

I’ve owned a few copies of Gus the Great over the years–they tend to wander off–and I buy them from Powell’s World of Books or search for a copy online. So far, I’ve been able to find a copy when I want one.

I thought of that book today when I read “A Library to Last Forever,” the op-ed piece in The New York Times by Google exec Sergey Brin. He’s not gloating, but Brin is clearly enjoying the fact that it looks like there will finally be an agreement between his company and the various groups of angry authors who challenged Google’s book digitizing project. (For a brief news story updating the lawsuit progress, click here.)

I’ve been inclined to buy into the image of Google-as-Goliath. The argument that the books would otherwise remain out of print (and hard for average readers to find) wasn’t quite persuading me that this monster-sized digitizing project was a good thing.

But now I’m converted. In the end, I think, readers will be the real winners. The way this has played out–helped by the noisy lawsuits by the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers–means that authors and their heirs will get a piece of the action, and books now available only in academic or private collections will be within reach of regular folks. Even out-of-work, ex-Harvard men.