I personally do what I can. I've been trying to find old phone books and catalogs at garage sales, scanning them when I can get them. I teach my children that this is a responsibility of theirs.
But if you're offering me even a fraction of Google's budget, I think I might manage to scale things up.
Perhaps a second tragedy is that we give money to those who provide us with something. A better world might be where we give Google’s money to people so that they can teach children to buy phone books at garage sales. In this way, civilization may prosper.
A simple search for "phone books" on Google Books yields no actual phone books, so the poster is objectively doing a better job than Google on that front.
But if you're offering me even a fraction of Google's budget, I think I might manage to scale things up.