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Charming. Agency prices for ebooks you can't (legitimately) download. Agency prices for a *viewing window*. Yeah, that'll go over real well. Especially after someone does something stupid and gets their Google account shut down, and loses access to their books.
I suppose it'll be nice to see the surge of stream-capture/download-and-crack software that'll come out of it.
The big publishers are working *very very hard* to pretend that the internet isn't really going to change the business model they've been using for the last hundred years or so. (The agency model is not actually a big change; commission-only sales are well-established business practices. It's not something publishers used before, but it doesn't require a big shift in corporate thought processes.)
The lawsuits that challenge the whole ebooks-as-licenses concept are likely to come out of something like Googlebooks--not so much because customers are likely to insist "I bought property, not a usage license," but because some clever person playing tax games is likely to attempt to put license-purchases into a different tax bracket from property purchases. A library might want to categorize license-purchases differently from book purchases, based on its funding/tax arrangements; the IRS might have an interest in insisting those are book purchases instead.
I'm expecting the next few years to be full of *fascinating* legal claims about intellectual property & sales terms.
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