I have been looking forward to this after hearing about it a couple of years back.
Do yourself a favour and check out http://books.google.com/.
Awesome. They are still working out the fine print with various stakeholders but there is already a lot of value there.
Partnering with universities around the world, Google has gone on a mission to scan as many texts as possible. As you can see by playing around with it, you can now search within the text of over 7 million titles. You can see links to all the books they reference and all the books that reference them. You can create online digital libraries of your own which friends can access. You can see previews of the texts of books in copyright, and the full text of ones that are in copyright.
Along with the rapidly improving ebooks, you will soon be able to access almost any text ever written in a matter of seconds.
What is also incredibly powerful is the ability to put in fragments of quotations, and it picks up the books they came from! Sorry plagiarizers, your days are gone!
"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor," said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. "While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips."
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