Perhaps the most significant change made to the deal is the limit to its scope. The EU as a whole (and several of its member countries) objected to several aspects of the settlement, which could have seen Google offer scans of European works that have never been licensed for sale in the US. Google offered to add European publishers and authors to the board that oversaw the handling of book content, but that was apparently not enough to satisfy the European publishing business; as a result, most of the EU has been dropped.
If you do not know, Google has been scanning books with the intention of allowing searching, but also of selling those scans as eBooks.
You'll notice from the quote above that the problem hasn't necessarily been that Google has been copying books, or even that they want to sell eBooks of those scans, but that they dare to offer them for sale outside of existing contracts.
Some of these books are decades old and haven't been released for almost as long. Many have unknown authors ("orphaned works"). Many were originally free!
All Google is doing is forcing the issue. Why should a book disappear into a library never to be seen again? Why not offer it for sale, as long as the author is compensated at a fair rate?
Because the owners of that copyright want to retain the right to prevent that sale. They may want to only sell their book in a particular region (for example, in Europe only), or they may have never intended their work to be for sale. Maybe the work is very out of date and they only wish the latest version to be for sale.
For newspapers and collections the problem is more complicated. Perhaps an author only sold their article or short story for publication in a single issue, being paid a price they were happy with for that short publication time line. How much should you charge for a newspaper with hundreds of articles in it? How for example do you share the $X paid for an old newspaper? More often single articles are sold for around $2, even though the newspaper (which had hundreds of articles) originally sold for less than that.
How about something like Google Books but for old audio recordings that are no longer for sale? Digital music stores like iTunes and Amazon forced the issue in a similar way to Google Books, but involved deals with record companies, not with the musicians involved. They also practically enforced a rate of sale ($1 per track) that the musicians involved may not be happy with. In some ways iTunes has made the "deleted CD" problem worse. It is easier for iTunes to remove a track from sale than it ever was removing a CD from sale. You can't find an iTunes track for sale second-hand.
Would it be possible to have a form of copyright that takes into account the commercial value of a product. If it is believed something has so little commercial value as for it to not be offered for sale, what copyright protections should it have? If a company (Google Books, iTunes, Amazon) is willing to put the effort into hosting and selling your product, what right do you have to say no?
What right should a reseller have to enforce a price on you? Or to force a format (and therefore sound or video quality) on you? The representatives of "The Beatles" are still trying to organise a contract they're happy with to allow their tracks to be sold digitally. What specifically is their issue? The price? The format? Buying single songs instead of albums?
What about embarrassing first works, such as that first demo you released, or those first modelling photos you had taken, or that first advertisement job?
Should you be able to stop that sold these being sold on iTunes or equivalent under copyright law? Or could another law (such as Privacy) cover it?
Perhaps copyright law could have another step between total control and public domain (no control). Perhaps there could be a step in between that retains ownership for authors etc. but that removes their right to prevent their product being available for sale?
Is that workable?