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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Remember that preview functionality is granted by contract with the publishers. Which is why some books have it and some books don't.

Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.

Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.

So blame publishers, not Google.

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I will blame overlong copyright term lengths. 70 years after authors death or 95 years after publication, allowing most recent work to enter the commons effectively after a century, or more, from now [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

This is the rare case when Europe is even worse. Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang film, is out of copyright in the United States but will still be in copyright in Germany until 2047: 120 fucking years.

It’s preposterous, and offensive to anyone’s intelligence to claim that this is about incentivizing production; does anyone seriously believe there is a potential artist out there who would avoid making their magnum opus if it could only be under copyright for 119 years?

The problem is, copyright law is no longer about artists, if it ever was: it’s about corporations, i.e. maximizing the value corporations can extract from intellectual property.

This post which was on the front page today is relevant: https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-01-25-slop.html

The previews are still there though, they just don't rank.

Right, that's what I'm saying. For whatever reason it seems publishers decided they don't want their preview-only books as part of the full-text search across all books. If they decide that, Google has to comply.

This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly available and so Google can return search results across whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say to turn off search, Google turns off search.

Given the argument over LLMs consuming books illegally, I think publishers could be a little concerned that an LLM that combined partial previews on every modern work on a subject might be a destroyer of the market for the average book on the subject with the license to do so having been properly granted via this feature.

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