I’m not sure I see the danger here. I might search “best of times + worst of times” and turn up a sentence or two. Then I might search for the last words of the sentence, and turn up another sentence or two. By repeating this thousands of times, without errors, I might reconstruct the entire text of your novel and read it without paying a dime, at a cost of hundreds of hours of mind-numbing labor.
Or I could read it at the public library.
I may not be their typical user, but when I use Google Books it’s mostly to find reference books in the public domain, or more modern stuff that I can buy on Alibris, Amazon or eBay.
One danger for publishers is that most books are not terribly good and are quickly forgotten. Unless books are digitised, a search engine won’t know about them. If they are, potential readers may find out of copyright or public domain books and information which will be better for their purposes than new books. The book trade depends on the evanescent.
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