Google's latest ambition - to digitise practically every book ever written so they can be searched in a fraction of a second - is so alluring that I find myself hoping it will win the lawsuit brought against it by publishers, even though I can't for the life of me work out which side is legally in the right as regards copyright.
The prospect of having an electronic wonder in the form of a virtual Library of Alexandria, in which anyone anywhere in the world can access almost anything ever written in books (as long as they are online) is just brilliant.
It could increase the knowledge of practically everyone willing to learn, cut down the years of research needed to do a PhD, and may even provide a legitimate reason for continuing improvements in our school and college examination results.
Among the institutions that have already agreed to take part are the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library.
There is no problem digitising books that are out of copyright - which could lead to a boom in the rapidly expanding print-on-demand industry.
But publishers are very angry about Google scanning books that are still covered by copyright protection, even if they are out of print and even though Google has offered an opt-out clause for authors and publishers not wanting to be part of it.
Google argues that for books not in the public domain it will merely provide pointers that contain the search terms used with, at most, a few lines of text. So if you want the whole book you will have to buy it at Amazon or your local bookshop.
That seems fair enough and a lot less damaging to authors than readers going into their local library and photocopying page after page.
It could lead to lots of forgotten books coming back into print. If it is true that less than 20% of books are actually in print and only 20% in the public domain, then Google's vision could lead to a huge leap in the scope for searchable knowledge.
Since, in the absence of this initiative, these books would stay in literary limbo, isn't Google doing the world a favour?
For its part, Google is merely doing to books what it has been doing to newspapers and magazines for years without anyone complaining much about breach of copyright.
Google wouldn't exist if its content providers had demanded royalties.
Why didn't they? It was partly because the internet hasn't managed to find an efficient system for collecting micro-payments.
But it was also because there was, and is, a kind of collective, if subconscious acceptance that the benefits of having all that information available for nothing far outweighs the messiness of asking everyone to pay, say, 1p every time they view a page.
The imposition of micro-payments could have killed the web in its tracks as the global phenomenon as we now know it.
There would be, of course, dangers if Google was allowed to become the monopoly custodian of knowledge. It knows an awful lot about the habits and movements of regular users, information valuable to government and commercial investigators.
At the moment it doesn't seem to matter that much because, notwithstanding some ghoulish mistakes (such as its chief executive officer complaining about people using Google to dig out information about him), it still seems like a good kind of company.
We do not know, of course, how much information about users it is being forced to hand over to the US government, but we give it more than the benefit of the doubt.
But what will happen in 10 years time? Will we feel as happy if Google, driven by the need to satisfy Wall Street's appetite for growth on a quarterly basis, turns into a different sort of company?
If its stock becomes unfashionable and it is taken over by a Rupert Murdoch or a Microsoft, would we trust it as much? But that is all in the future. For the moment I can't wait to have access to all those lost books. So Google on.
