As the deadline looms, New Zealand authors must decide whether to opt in to a controversial agreement which lets online giant Google scan their works for American audiences.

For the Eketahuna author whose masterpiece is gathering dust in the local Sallies' store, the prospect of exposure to a vast American audience browsing Google Book Search must be some consolation. Especially if a few greenbacks eventually trickle through from the publisher, under copyright.

For five years now, Google has been hoovering up all the information from millions of books worldwide, putting knowledge from the world's great research libraries just a mouse click away in the Google Library.

Internet users can access excerpts for research while subscribing libraries and similar institutions can buy whole books. It's a short step to all users downloading whole book files.

And it's not just research books. Google has digitised novels, poetry and non-fiction by Janet Frame, Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, Michael King, James K Baxter, Keri Hulme, Maurice Gee, Margaret Mahy and dozens of other New Zealand authors without their permission.

Google maintains it can digitise and show excerpts of copyrighted books under US "fair use" laws. It has also digitised thousands of books by agreement with authors under its Partner Programme.

But since 2004, it has scanned books without permission of the author or publisher through deals with libraries and institutions.

A court challenge by American authors and publishers last year was supposed to give them a degree of control over Google's activities and ensure copyright dues were paid.

What emerged was an out-of-court settlement full of compromises which - if ratified by a judge in October - could ensnare authors around the world. It looms, says the New York Review of Books, as an electronic library that could out-Amazon Amazon.

The internet's global reach and the e-book revolution made it inevitable that books by New Zealand authors would be digitised. But the proposed Google Books Settlement appears to challenge international copyright conventions and has left the world's writers with a stark choice: go with Google and limit your future options or opt out and receive not a pittance when Google digitises your work anyway.

Worse, writers have only until September 4, two weeks away, to nominate whether they want in or out of the proposed settlement.

As for internet users, it benefits only Americans - Google would be vulnerable to lawsuits if it extended access to other countries.

The purple prose coming from the New Zealand Society of Authors suggests a literary canon overflowing with airport potboilers. The deal is cultural imperialism on a par with the 1980s US flexing of military might over nuclear ship visits, says the Auckland branch secretary of the Society of Authors, Adrian Blackburn. " ... This monopolistic pre-emptive grab by a hugely wealthy US business - 'we'll just do it and you can sue us if you can afford to' - is an arrogant flexing of business muscle ...