I was an engineer in Google Books in 2011 and got an impression that this effort turned out to be not as useful as expected. This took away energy from the legal fight. Having access to every printed book seemed amazing in principle, but it didn't translate to amazing demand for the service. My theory is that it didn't lower the barriers to knowledge much -- there's not that much useful information left in offline-only storage.
mnl|6 years ago
I've used extensively Google Books for research of 17th century Mathematics (not just me, also the whole department were I was at that point). I couldn't have afforded to visit all the libraries to look up the originals but thanks to this repository I could download several copies of obscure works, which gives your very interesting insights: sometimes you hit a personal copy of a previous researcher, or there's an ex-libris from an old institution that you know your author was connected to, or you just discover something no one had noticed before simply with a clever string search. You can even backtrack to the forgotten true primary source of a mistakenly repeated fact for instance. It's been a blessing, honestly.
If you are into whatever not too transited alley of history, you realise soon that your (former?) company has produced a treasure trove for future generations that just shouldn't be shut down ever: there are many books there not digitized anywhere else. So thank you very, very much for your work there. It definitely belongs to the important.