Some time ago I’ve found in Google Book Search one of my books, ‘published’ there by my former Russian publisher, who has lost any rights to my novel 6 years ago. Furthermore, according to our agreement, the publisher was entitled to publish the novel in a book form only (which makes any other form of publication illegal).

I’ve contacted the Google Book Search Team with a request to change a copyright holder’s credentials and to put a link to my site. I was advised to ask ‘publisher’s’ permission to do that. In other words, the author has to beg a pirate for a favor.

But here comes what really worries me right now.

The final draft of this novel was also placed on my own site. Last weeks I’ve noticed a sharp decline of the novel’s pages in the Google index. At the moment only an intro (which is not included in the book) and 1 or 2 pages remain in the index.

Here is the question: could this removal of the pages from the index be a result of the presence of the same text in Google Book Search, which for Google constitutes duplicate content and could be penalized?

If you go to http://www.copyscape.com/ and run http://www.skorobogatov.com/literatura_RU/ZB_1_1.html (the 1st chapter of my novel), you’ll see 5 Google Book Search’s pages with the same text.

As far as I understand the situation, from Google’s point of view, it’s a clear case of duplicate content.

What do you think, are my worries substantiated? As at this point the only way to get rid of these duplicating texts is filing a DMCA, should I do that?

Anyway, what would you do in my situation?

Thanks for any advise!
sash