I wonder if the date problem is a bug, not a feature?

Is it possible to dump the metadata of a book and check if they have the right date? There should probably be multiple dates for a book -- date written, date copyrighted, date published, date of latest edition, etc.

My guess is that Google does not have a publicly-available issue tracker for Google Books so you can't easily report this problem. Hacker News is a good way to get their attention, though...