Earlier Blogoscoped discussed Google's settlement with The Authors Guild.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/149509.html

Now Miracle Jones at The Fiction Circus has an entertaining analysis of the settlement.
http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=308&mode=one

Google pays Authors Guild $125 million.
The Authors Guild uses $45 million of that to pay authors.
Authors get between $60 and $300 per book scanned before May 5, 2009.

Where does the other $80 million go?

Robert Darton at The New York Review of Books has another good analysis comparing copyright and exchanging ideas on the web to the 18th century exchange of ideas.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

"Of the seven million books that Google reportedly had digitized by November 2008, one million are works in the public domain; one million are in copyright and in print; and five million are in copyright but out of print."

other coverage:
http://gawker.com/5161282/googles-piddling-60-promise-to-writers

The settlement may still be subject to court approval.

Apparently authors may choose to participate in promotions with Google to earn more money through ads or sales.

Does this entitle Google to distribute the contents of the books or only index the contents? My impression is that Google can only index the books, but portions of the contents may be distributed for a fee, paid by either Google or the reader.

Slashdot has a discussion thread on this.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/03/1628233

Thanks, George R., for that comprehensive heads-up. My guess is the other $80 million went into a fund which will cover current administration of the payments, as well as earn money towards future, yet "unscanned" authors' dividends, those who are [either] covered [OR] explicitly not excluded under the terms of the agreement. On top of that some not insubstantial part of it *may* be set aside to cover the Guild's legal costs in any not-too-distant class-action wrangle with parties considering themselves to be afflicted.

Please continue your executive-summary-style coverage of that highly important topic.... slashdot discussions are a cesspool of highly sophisticated opinion, but not easy to wade through without stepping into some [REDACTED]ty argument.