At one point Google Books was supposed to act as a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. You could have purchased a scan of any book on the site for a reasonable price, and libraries could subscribe to a service where the full text of all books was available. This settlement then got shot down because some research libraries and authors argued that this was anti-competitive, and instead wanted Congress to pass a law to free up the rights to orphaned books so anyone could start a competing service. No progress on this was subsequently made because nobody in Congress cares enough about the rights to out-of-print books to get legislation passed. The whole reason why they're out of print when ebooks and print-on-demand exist is that they won't get enough sales to make it worth the time and money to figure out who the royalties should go to. It's not a flashy issue that would make a ton of people vote for you to get re-elected, and it won't create a ton of new jobs. The result is that now nobody outside of Google gets to see the full Google Books scans.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi

Big companies will read up the books and make their AI recite them from memory, but Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent)

> Whenever I need something from Google Books I inevitably reach the message that this is a limited preview and the part I need is not included.

> I therefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day disappear forever.

Can you still search the restricted parts? If so there's still value to it: it helps you identify the book so you do an inter-library loan to get at the full content. Sure, it's not frictionless, but I wouldn't be all or nothing about it.