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A group of 15 authors and publishers and two organizations in India have filed a formal objection to the Google Books Settlement.

The Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation and the Federation of Indian Publishers and these 15 individuals join a panoply of international entities who have objected to Google's ambitious and controversial plan to scan as many books as possible throughout the world. Though the search and Web app giant's scheme would create a vast online library, it may also infringe on the rights of content creators and has created a lengthy international legal battle.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Google announced more details about their upcoming online ebook service known as "Google Editions." Originally revealed earlier this year, Editions will be a hosted electronic bookstore for a selection of in-print books which would be provided by Google's publishing partners. And unlike some other ebook formats, like those designed for Amazon's Kindle for instance, the so-called "Google editions" will be readable on any device whether that's a laptop, phone or dedicated eReader.

According to news coming out of the Book Fair event, the new digital books program will launch in the first half of 2010 and will offer 400,000 to 600,000 ebooks at that time.

On Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel used her weekly video podcast to attack Google and the Google Book Settlement. According to Merkel, the Google Book Settlement disregards international copyright laws. Merkel, who mostly focuses on the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair in her rather anemic video, also stressed that Germany will do its best to protect German authors against what the government considers to be blatant copyright infringement. Both Germany and France filed complaints against the Google Book settlement last month.

When you think about Google Books, chances are that you are thinking about eBooks and searching books on your desktop. Starting today, however, On Demand Books, the makers of the Espresso Book Machine, will have access to Google's vast library of public domain books. Bookstores that buy an Espresso Book Machine will now be able to provide on-demand printing services for any of the close to 2 million books in Google's repository.

Earlier this morning Google Books announced a program where rights owners would be given the option to modify their copyright licenses and specify them as Creative Commons (CC) works. The initiative allows writers, artists and publishers to mark their books with one of 6 CC version 3 licenses, a public domain license or the CC "no rights reserved" license.