Google Print goes live, publishers and authors go ballistic

ars technica: "The controversial Google Print project has now gone live (in the Google universe, 'live' = 'beta'), and the company has begun scanning books again for entry into the massive database. We at Ars have reported on some of the legal wrangling surrounding the project, specifically the lawsuits brought by the Author's Guild and the publishing industry against Google.
In a nutshell, Google Print aims to do for dead tree books what Google has done for the web�compile the contents of the world's printed books into a massive, searchable database that allows users to view book excerpts and purchase copies. Currently, you can get through about four pages of a copyrighted book before the application shuts you out, so even though the entire book is indexed it's not (yet) possible to get the entire book through the service.
The publishing industry has rightly identified Google Print as a threat to their control over authors' content, and many authors themselves have correctly percieved that their control over who can economically exploit their work and in what manner has just gotten weaker. "