Peter Brantley, who is Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, highlights a significant educational scenario of Google Print and having a large collection of digitized books:

Re-mix and Re-use. What might that mean in the context of a large online library of digital books? We need look no further than O’Reilly’s SafariU, a wonderful effort which permits faculty instructors to create their own textbooks by re-assembling content from a deep collection of technical works.

That specific capability isn’t a feature of Google Print but it certainly is one area where this all should be heading. Peter’s personal blog shimenawa has a lot of interesting ideas on this and related topics.

While the lawsuit from the publishing community is based on the issue of copyright, I continue to suspect that the underlying motivation is that the publishing community is beginning to awake to the long-term financial gains of making their digital content accessible in segmented quantities as Peter describes and they don’t want Google to be an eventual competitor in this market. If the publishers do win their lawsuit, then I hope that they will move towards innovative strategies with their digital content in ways similar to SafariU (though I’m not holding my breath).