The quality of scans from Google Books seems very low to me; much lower than I'd use on my own Web site, http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ - it's not uncommon for pages to be missed, and in one 19th century mechanics textbook I was looking at, the low scan resolution meant that most of the line drawings and diagrams vanished entirely.
It's obvious to me that the Google work will need to be done again by people who care about the content. Note, by the way, that most flat-bed scanners destroy the binding of books, although some people are now using e.g. a Canon 5D full-frame-sensor SLR camera instead. For illustrations, some simple mathematics (and experience) shows 600dpi to be an absolute minimum for a scan of an engraving, with fine steel engravings needing at least 1200dpi (I used 2400) in order to prevent the lines from being aliased into a blotchy gray. This is much higher than the Canon SLR gives, but Betterlight have a 500 megapixel backend to a medium-format professional camera that would give enough resolution for a good digital fac simile, and e.g. the University of Wisconsin uses that sort of equipment. But it's much slower and hence more costly, and the files are huge.
Here's a fragment of text from a Google book I've been working with:
ALLEN ^Anthony), an English lawyer and antiquaiy,
was born at Great Hadbam in Hertfordshire, about the end
of the seventeenth century, and was edu<?^ted at ffton;
whence he went to King's college, Cambridge, and took
his bachelor's degree in 1707, and his master's in 1711.
He afterwards studied law, was ciiJI^d.to' the bar, and bjr
the influence of Arthur OnsloW^ speaker of the house of
commons, became a roaster in chancery. His reputation
as a lawyer was inconsiderable, Jbiut he was Esteemed a good
classical scholar, and a man of Wit: and -convivial habits.
The version I have at http://words.fromoldbooks.org/Chalmers-Biography/a/allen-anthony.html (I am still working on these) is based on scanning done at the University of Toronto, combined with four other digitisations, including two apparently independent ones by Google, both of the quality demonstrated here.
It might turn out that it would have been less work to have scanned this 32-volume encyclopedia myself (I have a copy) and so the OCR with commercial software that works 1,000 times better than Google's, but, for reprints, the important thing is the quality of the scanned images, not the OCR - and there too, the Google scans are really sucky.