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This might be the smartest thing written about Google Print/Library.

Google Print: Copyright vs. Innovation vs. commercial value

Let's step back for a moment. Why is Google doing this book-scanning project? It's not because it's just so cool (even if it is). While coolness may justify a small-scale promotional project, the scanning efforts are expensive. So Google, as a company, obviously sees some value in the effort. This is not wrong. But it's also a direct conflict with the granted monopoly know as copyright. Whenever
there is value, particularly commercial value, there is conflict over who should be able to receive it.

It's not hard at all to see potential returns here. Besides the obvious selling of ads from searches, consider that it positions Google to be a potential partner in any e-books venture. It's not a guarantee. But if a company already has a scanned, indexed, "production" version of the book, that's a good selling point. From this perspective, Google's interest in working with libraries can be seen as a way to do an end-run around contracts with publishers, and Amazon's own evident efforts (talking about doing well by doing good!)

That's just an example. Look at it this way. Google is saying, "Let us make e-books of all library content, and keep them - for copyright reasons we'll only display search results". That's clearly very dubious under copyright. But ... it's obviously an innovation. However, it's a very commercially valuable innovation. Which brings us back to copyright. A problem with the polarized debate over copyright is that it's often framed in terms of morality of property rights, opposed by individual usage rights (which leads to screaming of "monopolists" vs "thief"). But if the Google Print scanning project is viewed as a balance of economic interests - between one company that wants to leverage its search expertise into the e-book area, and other companies which want to maintain their limited monopoly on the potential market, then assuming one believes copyright properly grants some exclusive rights - it's not obvious which is correct here.

That is, the technology company can't be right every time, almost by definition. Because copyright as a limited monopoly fundamentally restricts innovation in some ways. That's the trade-off.