That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them.

But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.