bruce said:

I have no idea how many books Google scanned published after 1922 which are probably PD because the copyright was apparently not renewed

it would be foolish for google to take the risk of showing books published after 1922. if even one had been renewed, it would become ammunition for the other side.

nor the number of books scanned even though the book is still under copyright.

we could extrapolate from the ratio of public-domain to copyrighted titles in the libraries, but that would assume that they aren't taking that into consideration, and they might well be. i believe they had said that they would concentrate on public-domain titles first. (or maybe that's just what michael _said_ they said.) at any rate, i'm happy to sit back and wait while they continue to do more scanning... -bowerbird