“The publishers have said, ‘We want to settle,’ but Google’s motivation to settle is quite a bit lower,” said Pamela Samuelson, an expert in digital copyright law at the University of California, Berkeley, who has opposed the settlement. Still, she said, Google, which has already scanned 15 million books, is unlikely to give up. “The next thing to do is think about going to Congress and getting legislation that would make particularly orphan works available to the public,” she said.

Aside from appealing the decision of the judge, Denny Chin, publishers and authors have several choices. They could drop or revive their original copyright lawsuit against Google, which claimed that even Google’s more modest initial plan to scan books and show snippets of their text was illegal. Those issues have never been litigated.

Dropping the suit seems unlikely given the amount of money and time the publishers have already invested in the fight, said people briefed on the negotiations but who were not authorized to discuss them publicly because they were confidential. Several analysts said the publishers would like to avoid going to court.

Another option, which publishers and authors said Wednesday was attractive to them, would be to reach a new settlement with Google that requires each author or copyright owner to opt in and permit Google to digitize their works. Judge Chin said that many of his concerns would be ameliorated if the parties came to this agreement.

“We’d love to sit down with our negotiating partners and arrive at a very quick solution,” said Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, which was a party to the original settlement. “But given the complexity of this, the Cubs might win the World Series before this is resolved.”