Google has for many years scanned large numbers of books including many covered by copyright. Making content from this process available has brought legal challenges from the copyright holders.
However, if you try Google Books you can see the benefits. I found out our books were scanned and it was kind of fun to search for different things.
The suit brought against Google argued that content could be secured without a purchase.
For books in “snippet view” (in contrast to “full view” books), Google divides each page into eighths — each of which is a “snippet,” a verbatim excerpt. (Google Resp. ¶¶ 43, 44). Each search generates three snippets, but by performing multiple searches using different search terms, a single user may view far more than three snippets, as different searches can return different snippets. (Google Resp. ¶ 45). For example, by making a series of consecutive, slightly different searches of the book Ball Four, a single user can view many different snippets from the book. (Google Resp. ¶¶ 46, 47).
The reference in the comment I have abstracted is to Bouton’s “Ball Four”. However, having explored what this looks like for my own books it does not seem a serious concern. For a given search, I can view three “snippets” of a couple of sentences. As a viewer, it would give me some assurance that the author has addressed a topic, but the amount of content I could collect is minimal.
The newest decision argued that what Google is provided is covered under “fair use”.
Fair use rulings focus on four factors. Of these, the most important is whether the use of the work is “transformative.” Chin ruled that Google Books passes this test easily.
“Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books,” he wrote. “Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books.”