Heck, I can even figure out what much of that 300+ page settlement is saying and I’ve heard experienced lawyers say much the same thing. It opens with no less than 160 terms whose meaning must be understood or the whole agreement is a mystery. And if I don’t understand it, how can I know what I can and cannot control? Like a lot of others, Healy’s definitely been guzzling Google’s Kook Aid.

The best option for writers and publishers is having your own website. Post what you want there. Describe and extract the book as you choose. Link to the retail outlets that suit you, some of which will pay you for sales. And if you don’t like something, you can change it in a few minutes without getting anyone’s permission. If you want to go digital, other distributors of digital texts charge about half what Google does.

Never forget that once you sign on the dotted line, if you disagree with them about what one of those hundreds of clauses mean, it’d be you against all the lawyers a $28 billion firm can hire. Thinking of getting a lawyer to fight them? The low-end charge for intellectual property lawyers is about $300/hour. You can pay someone to keep up your website for a lot less than that.

Having your own website is genuine ‘unprecedented control’ and vastly better than being Google’s little registered-poodle-on-a-leash, subject to their rules, whatever those rules turn out to be.