Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia (Wired News) by Gary Wolf. Fascinating story of efforts on digitising books. Today (2003-10-23) amazon.com has opened a full-text search service for 120,000 books it sells. You can also browse the images of the pages of the books (some fees required). The article also mentions the other efforts such as the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. The dumb every-increasing-copyright terms do get in the way, of course. And it's only available at amazon.com, not any other country. I can wish that publishers would get a clue and make this kind of thing easy; compare to the music industry and MP3s who are just working out what content they deal with - music, not silver-coated plastic disks.