Google books suit

The whole project should be sued out of existence.

Not the whole project, I don't think. Just the 'out of print but not out of copyright' part. And the 'opt out' part. It seriously annoys me that living authors whose works aren't out of copyright have to 'opt out' -- a time-consuming and cumbersome process (and that's putting it nicely). Any work under copyright, no matter how old and obscure, should not be included unless the copyright holder asks for it to be included.

But for authors whose books went out of print years ago and for which there isn't sufficient interest to get a reprint deal now, I think making the books available is a fantastic thing....assuming the author chooses it.

And for books that are in the public domain, I think the Gutenberg Project is doing a far better job, since they're both scanning and proofreading the text, not just scanning it and letting it out into the wild full of OCR mistakes.

Out of print does not mean out of copyright. I really am uneasy about this - for one organization to have control of so much literature - is not right. £77 million does not seem a lot to pay authors with - unless they feel that the scheme is not going to be very popular!
Google should ask the authors permission for use of their work and not expect authors to spend time opting out. I would be tempted to bill them for time used to do the opt out stuff.