For a long time, the Japanese publishing industry was in the dark about the Google Book Search Library project, the ambitious endeavor by the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant to create a vast online library by scanning millions of books. Google announced the start of the project in 2004, but people in Japan were indifferent for years, thinking that it was just taigan no kaji, or "fire on the other side of the river."
Then the fire spread to Japan in late February, when Google Inc. put a legal notice in vernacular publications, including the dailies Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, declaring that book authors, publishers and other copyright owners of books in Japan could also be affected by a class-action settlement reached last October between the firm, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
Google, through tieups with major universities and public libraries around the world, has already scanned more than 7 million books — including a sizable collection of in-copyright, Japanese-language books held at U.S. universities.