"This is the day the world changes."
--John Wilkin, University of Michigan

This is so cool! I can barely contain myself.

Google is going to start scanning books from major libraries and make them freely available on the web. The full text of books no longer under copyright will be fully available. Books still under copyright will only have a page or two displayed; similar to what you are able too see when you read excerpts of books from Amazon.com.

The libraries lined up so far are:

Michigan University (all 7,000,000 books; estimated to take 6 years)
Stanford University (all books)
Oxford University (all books published prior to 1901)
Harvard University (40,000 of their 15,000,000 books to test the process)
The New York Public Library (only a small portion of books no longer under copyright)