The universities did get the scans. They're in the HathiTrust project. The public gets access to scans of out-of-copyright works. University faculty, students, and other researchers can get access to in-copyright works too.

For the general public HathiTrust is like Google Books with worse search and worse UI but more books readable in full. Sometimes I search Books and then go over to HathiTrust when I find that Books has unreasonably restricted viewing of some search hits.