It seems like you missed the specifier "of places and people". Books are not people or places, but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place.
> They're upset about google building dossiers on people.
Their location being in that dossier is part of what upsets people.
>but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place.
Except I'm not aware of any geoip databases that operate on a per-IP level. It's way too noisy, given that basically everyone uses dynamic IP addresses. At best you can figure out a given /24 is used by a given ISP to cover a certain neighborhood, not that 1.2.3.4 belongs is John Smith or 742 Evergreen Terrace.
At least in some cases, e.g. when multiple devices that are logged into their respective Google accounts are using that IP, and Google knows what location those usually reside at when together.
I've had Google pop up reliable location results for me, to the granularity of a small town, even if they had no information about me specifically to help them deduce this. It doesn't always happen though.
Good to know, that does shift my opinion a bit. There is a spectrum from surveilling individuals to gathering population statistics. I'm not sure exactly where data that identifies a user to a group size of ~250 falls, especially given the geographic correlation, but it's definitely better.
> They're upset about google building dossiers on people.
Their location being in that dossier is part of what upsets people.