You can download the latest Dan Brown novel to your Kindle in even less time than it takes to forget the content. You can equally easily obtain an audio recording of Pride and Prejudice or track a reference in The Wealth of Nations. Wherever I am in the world, I can consult any economics article from the 1990s. The prospect of a universal online library is potentially the most exciting development for readers and scholars for generations.

But if you have done any or all of these things, you will also have experienced frustrations. You can get an e-book of Dan Brown or Jane Austen, but books that are neither very old nor very new are harder to find. Bizarrely, you can easily get economic articles so long as they are neither very old nor very new.

On November 13 last year, two leading associations representing American authors and publishers put forward to a New York District Court a revised settlement on the digitisation of books with Google. The revision was the latest twist in a class-action lawsuit filed against Google in 2005 alleging that the search group's plan to build a global digital library trampled on authors and publishers' intellectual rights.