I’m not a member of the Authors Guild, but I am an author, and I think it’s downright stupid for the Authors Guild to oppose Amazon.com’s full text search feature. In reality, they’re trying to assert authors’ rights against their publishers, but the end result would be to kill an incredible tool to help sell books. There’s no realistic way that Amazon.com can get a release from every single author in their database, much less the authors of all of the books that aren’t yet indexed. The forest for the trees issue here is that if you want to steal the partial content of a book, you can easily go to the library and photocopy it or go to a bookstore and just read it.