For some, it seems that the dream of a perfect research machine is almost within reach. Google announced late last year that it would digitize millions of bound books, making available online the full text of public-domain books and excerpts from works still in copyright. Thrilling and dazzling as the potential for research and distribution opportunities sounds, the author views the Library Project as a risky deal for libraries, researchers, academics, and the public in general. Citing Google's corporate mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Vaidhyanathan expresses concern regarding the propriety of a single company to organize all the world's information, asking if universities, libraries, academics, and librarians have failed in their missions. Is anyone even watching, asks the author, to see if Google does the job properly? Vaidhyanathan notes that the Google Library Project looks and feels much different than Google Publisher Program, which presents full-text searches authorized by publishers of many thousands of books, while permitting view of only a few pages at a time and without print capability. Google Library will allow users to search and read the entire text of works in the public domain; for works still under copyright, it will provide only short snippets of text with search words in context. Acknowledging that, if successful, Google may solve research problems caused by present services that: (1) rely on keyword-within-text searches of periodicals, government and legal documents, dissertations, and other specialized materials to include the full texts of books; (2) are exclusive; and (3) offer better information at the most frequently-referenced source, the author cites offsetting concerns in at least 3 major areas; (1) privacy (nothing in Google's current privacy policy agrees not to share individual reading records of patrons); (2) privatization (companies change and fail); and (3) property (an apparent contradiction between being heavily invested in proprietary formats and technologies while also self-proclaimed champion of the public interest in matters of intellectual property and Internet freedom). The most serious problem represented by Google Library concerns intellectual property: the writer provides information from significant copyright cases and maintains that Google's plan to copy books further destabilizes a system already out of equilibrium. The presumption that Google's powers of indexing and access come close to working as a library ignores all that libraries mean to the lives of their users, concludes Vaidhyanathan, who advocates that such services as those provided by Google Library are needed, but that they should be library projects rather than a relinquishment of core duties by libraries to private corporations for the expediency of quantity and convenience.