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Brad Hill reports that the American Association of Publishers has sued Google over its Google Print book scanning initiative, following suit (literally, pardon the pun) with the Author's Guild, which did the same a month ago.

The AAP represents over 300 publishers, including some of the world's largest: Pearson Education, Wiley, McGraw-Hill, Simon and Schuster.

Brad makes the correct point that even if Google's program is a good thing, which the publishers may agree with, they still have to sue on copyright principle. Couldn't Google have handled this at some point over the last year?

AAP president Pat Schroeder:

Schroeder: "As a way of accomplishing the legal use of copyrighted works in the Print Library Project, AAP proposed to Google that they utilize the well-known ISBN numbering system to identify works under copyright and secure permission from publishers and authors to scan these works. Since the inception of the ISBN system in 1967, a unique ISBN number has been placed on every book, identifying each book and linking it to a specific publisher. Google flatly rejected this reasonable proposal."

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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