Short answers, pulled from the story.
Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program or by libraries through the Library Project. Results appear in both Google Search and the dedicated books.google.com website.
Google has scanned more than 40 million titles, a figure the company confirmed when it celebrated 15 years of Google Books. Google estimated in 2010 that there were approximately 129,864,880 distinct titles in the world and stated its intention to scan all of them, representing over 4 billion digital pages and 2 trillion words.
The Authors Guild filed a class-action lawsuit against Google in September 2005, and five large publishers filed a separate civil suit in October 2005, both citing copyright infringement. The publishers eventually settled separately, while the Authors Guild case continued through multiple appeals. US District Judge Denny Chin ruled in Google's favor in November 2013, the Second Circuit upheld that ruling in October 2015, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal in April 2016.
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page conceived the idea while graduate students at Stanford in 1996. A team at Google officially launched the secret books project in 2002, beginning with scanning experiments that initially took 40 minutes to digitize a single 300-page book. The project was first publicly introduced as Google Print at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004.
Google Books has four access levels. Full view allows complete reading and free download of public domain books and some publisher-approved titles. Preview limits viewable pages to a percentage set by publishers, with a minimum of 20%. Snippet view shows two to three lines of text around a search term for books where no permission has been granted, capped at three snippets per term. No preview applies to books that have not been digitized, displaying only metadata such as title, author, and ISBN.
A review of 400 randomly selected Google Books records found that 36% contained metadata errors, a rate described as higher than one would expect from a typical library catalog. Documented errors include works attributed to Charles Dickens with dates before his birth in 1812, a Moby Dick edition catalogued under "computers," and the metadata for an 1818 mathematical work incorrectly attached to a 1963 romance novel.