As you probably know, Google began it's Book Search project a while ago, scanning the collections of prominent academic libraries in the US and England. We're now beginning to see the most practical uses of Google Book Search. Google began offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain -- books that were published before 1923 or whose copyright has expired. See for example this copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty scanned from the Library at Stanford.

I had to read this book in grad school. Students will be able to save quite a few dollars I suppose because of this, but think of the money they'll spend printing these things out. Someone's got to come up with a usable ebook reader. I'm certainly not scrolling through a book like this on my PPC PDA, even in landscape mode. When's the affordable, easy to use E Ink based product going to hit so I can read a novel like Jean Luc Picard in his "Ready Room"?

In any case, this is a great development. If we do see a usable method for toting these ebooks around, I can't see why Google couldn't begin selling ebooks like Amazon does. But maybe that's years away from being a reality. The good thing is the dead tree data is getting digitized in some standardized and accessible fashion.

Amazon's Online Reader is really nice, by the way. Here's a demo using a Beatles book.