I surrender. I have decided to hand my life over to Google.
For years, I resisted. I turned down an early invitation to use Gmail. I carped about Google’s book digitization project. I never wrote my columns on Google Docs. I never used Google Calendar, which provided a wonderful excuse for blowing off deadlines and missing appointments. I planned to oppose the Google Books Settlement, if I ever got around to reading it.
So, what has changed?
Everything.
1. Google Docs is fine. Someone told me it doesn’t have pagination. (It does, for printing.) Why do I need page numbers? These columns run 700 words, then bang, you’re out. I can write them anywhere: at work, at somebody else’s house, on a public computer at a rural library. No laptop-lugging required.
2. Google Calendar is great. I remember telling certified computer genius Richard Greenblatt in 1990 that it would be great to have dynamic calendar software, so that my wife and I could stop double-booking events (e.g., her book group meets in the TV room, where I need to watch the World Series). That doesn’t happen anymore.
3. E-mail. After much resistance, I tried to switch to Gmail earlier this year. But I couldn’t get the Microsoft Hotmail server to forward my messages, and there were no 13-year-olds in the house to help me. I am probably better off without it. One of my sons called my proposed e-dress, “alexbeam007,’’ “very 1998, very AOL.’’
4. Search? Google is the Alta Vista of the 21st century. My work computer defaults to Bing, Microsoft’s new Google-challenging search engine that has wrested a fractional market share from big G. I don’t like anything about it, except possibly the flashy graphics.
Last week I had to check a fact about Otis Chandler, and Google took me to the exact page I needed, from David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be.’’ A few years ago, I would have had to go to the library, find the book, and so on. Bing can’t do that because it didn’t digitize the book.
5. Book digitization. This summer, Google Books engineering director Daniel Clancy invited his top critics from the Boston Public Library, MIT, and Harvard to discuss his company’s controversial book scanning program in front of an audience. Got gripes? Bring ’em on! It made for a fascinating evening.
I wouldn’t say that Clancy convinced his many detractors, some of them from small libraries legitimately concerned that they can’t pay the high fees for access to all of Google’s scans. But he impressed me. In this field, Google is the proverbial trailblazer with arrows in its back, pilloried by also-rans. Sooner or later, I suspect Google will make accommodations to its digitization plans that will assuage many critics.
If you are keeping score at home, Google has scanned 10 million books and counting.
6. The Google Books Settlement. This is real legal arcana. If you are a published author, or the executor of an author, Google wants the nonexclusive rights to sell your book, or portions of your book, electronically through its search engine. It will pay you.
Even though the settlement has an easy-to-exercise opt-out provision, an impressive array of institutions oppose it, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, the German government, and our own Department of Justice. The people who don’t oppose it are authors delighted to know that someone might finally be reading their long-ignored and long out-of-print works.
The dirty secret is that this agreement will have zero impact on practically all authors. If you have books in print, they are already competing with library copies and with the Internet resale market from which you get no money. If your books are out of print, here is Google offering you a trickle of income, where before you had zilch.
7. Google Voice. Are you kidding me? A free, programmable telephone number that directs calls to any line you wish, whenever you wish? With free call recording, voice mail, and call screening? No wonder the iPhone and AT&T are fighting this tooth and nail. “It’s not totally new, but Google is in a position to make it stick,’’ Hiawatha Bray, Globe technology writer, told viewers in a webcast this year. “It’s one of the coolest giveaways they’ve come up with yet.’’
Google, take me, I’m yours.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is alexbeam007 - just kidding! - beam@globe.com. 
