$750 for book excerpts seems pretty outrageous to me. They're not putting a complete copy up.

$750 isn't outrageous... For the authors to pay to Google for that kind if publicity/advertising.

It's not specifically publicity or advertising though, is it? They're indexing the entire text and making that available publicly.

Most books don't break even. Also, many books scanned by google are not easily available, out of print, or out of copyright, so I would be very surprised if google is costing authors anything like $750 per book. In fact I would suspect, if anything, it will help drive book sales.

The other thing that crossed my mind is that Google is still making use of the books - I doubt that just making them available publicly is part of their plan. If they're also licensing them for spelling correction and translation, how does that affect the pricing?