According to recent article from Guardian UK, 6,500 authors, publishers, and literary agents have opted out of the Google Book Search settlement. Those wishing to opt out were required to do so before the fairness hearing on February 18th. As mentioned in a previous posting, the judge did not rule on the settlement due to the amount of information. The judge is planning to write an opinion of his views which could take several months. The Guardian article includes some interesting comments from authors. Science fiction author Gwyneth Jones noted, "The danger to me, and every other writer, is not that our works will be available free online (I offer most of my recent novels free online already. These 'portable document format' novels are the text as I wrote it, and they do my sales no harm at all). The danger of the digital 'publishing’ corporations is their unprecedented access to billions of tiny payments, for product that costs them effectively nothing, at their point of entry. This seems to mean they don't have to worry about any form of resistance at all. I don't like the sound of that, not from anybody's point of view."
