The worst case scenario is that it makes no less sense than the original Twitter fail whale. That was a completely out-of-context picture which made no sense,

The worst case scenario is that it makes no less sense than the original Twitter fail whale. That was a completely out-of-context picture which made no sense, but nobody complained about it. Likewise, anyone confronted with a google books fail whale (which, incidentally, should happen a lot less often than the twitter fail whale, because google's infrastructure doesn't suck) without the preceding context of the twitter fail whale will understand what the page means just as much as they'd understand "404 not found".