alt Hacker News> The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome
I don't think they were overcome. As far as I remember Google couldn't make the books available so they abandoned the project. They possess the scans (if they didn't delete them) but they won't be made public.
Replies
doctorpangloss • today at 5:42 PM
The consensus among copyright lawyers is Google lost Authors Guild v Google, but for some reason the media and Wikipedia do not clearly report it that way.
IIRC the courts ruled that because it would be implausibe for a person to use google books previews to read an entire work (you'd have to make a whole bunch of separate accounts to do so), it could not plausibly impact the market for that work.