It looks like Google’s attempt to bury the hatchet with authors and publishers in its bid to digitize a world’s worth of books may be in jeopardy after a New York federal judge on Tuesday rejected a $125 million settlement reached in October 2008.

Google promotes that settlement on its Google Books page as “with a broad class of authors and publishers to make the world’s books even more accessible online,” but Judge Denny Chin was having none of it. Chin said the deal would “arguably give Google control over the search market,” and that its terms went too far. Specifically: That the settlement would give Google a “de facto monopoly” on digitized content.

You may have heard that Google wants to scan and convert to text every book in the known universe. You may have heard that notion sold by politicians like John Conyers as possibly “the greatest innovation in book publishing since the Gutenberg press.” You may also have heard it called “a disaster for scholars,” or as UC Berkeley language professor and longtime NPR contributor Geoffrey Nunberg puts it, “a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.”

Google’s argues it just wants to let you search the full text of any book scanned and digitally tucked away in its online database. Also: That it wants to “democratize knowledge” by scanning essentially everything textual created since, well, ever (precisely 129,864,880 books at last count, according to Google, of which its scanned about 12 million so far). That worried pretty much everyone in the publishing industry when Google made its plans public in 2004–enough to trigger several domestic and international lawsuits.

In 2008, Google settled with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers, agreeing to pay $125 million upfront and make it possible for authors and publishers to get paid any time their books are viewed online, all in trade for the right to publish millions of books online. The settlement’s been knocking around the legal system since, finally landing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday.

Google called the ruling “disappointing,” no surprise, but Chin left the door open for an amended settlement by rejecting the current one “without prejudice.” What’s to amend? Chin wants the settlement switched to “opt in,” preventing Google from using copyrighted material by default if copyright owners fail to “opt out.”

Does all of human knowledge registered as text “want to be free”? It’s probably the wrong question. The right one is: Do we want a single strictly commercial entity holding the e-library door and key to every novel, history, treatise, and manual ever written, including how it’s indexed, presented, and shared?

It’s a fabulous idea, and as someone who isn’t ashamed to admit he’s a magazine junkie, I’m very excited by it. But I’m also very frustrated by the interface in its current state.

I wanted, for instance, for the mention of Computerworld above to link to the Computerworld archive on Book Search. But I have no idea how to find it. Weird as it sounds, searching Google Book Search for Computerworld doesn’t pull it up. I know it’s there. Somewhere.

(Aha! I found a link to Computerworld’s first issue in a blog–no thanks to Book Search.)

If you somehow figure out how to pull up a particular magazine on Book Search, you get an interface that’s in many ways terrific, with browsable thumbnails of covers and a readers that lets you pull up any issue for perusal. Here’s New York magazine, which I only found because Google’s blog post on the new magazines pointed to it. (The URL? The memorable http://books.google.com/books?id=OugCAAAAMBAJ.)

I still can’t tell, however, whether the “Search in this magazine” feature searches all issues of New York, or just the one that’s currently selected. (I think it’s the latter, but I’m not going to make any bets.)

Are there advanced features like keyword searches that might let you find a particular magazine or search all issues of it? Maybe. There’s an advanced search feature–but it’s not linked to from all pages in Book Search, and while it lets you restrict searches to magazines rather than books, this didn’t help me find stuff I was looking for. (When I restricted my search for Computerworld to magazines, it pulled up scads of issues of…sister publication CIO. Which mentions Computerworld in some boilerplate text.)

Part of the problem here is revealed by the very name of the service: What exactly are magazines doing in something called Google Book Search? (Side note: Book Search originally had the more appropriate name of Google Print.) They’re a different beast, and call for a different set of search tools. Book Search seems to be focused on letting you search across its entire archive of books, magazines, and other items; that’s a big part of the search challenge, but far from all of it.

Am I being too cranky about a wonderful, wildly ambitious initiative that’s an outstanding example of Google following its corporate mission? Probably, considering that I plan to spend plenty of quality time burrowing through its riches, starting tonight. It’s just that it would be so much more useful if finding stuff–specific magazines and articles within them–was a whole lot easier.