In a follow-up from this post i've picked up: O'Reilly radar , here's the future of Scholarship and education, I truly think.
Google Books Serch has been undoubtedly useful but, they don't seem to be digitising classic books in law, medicine and various sciences, which are very famous and now in public domain.
However, publishers who have transcribed and published them, have put in Google Books where only few pages/lines can be accessed.
Books are horribly expensive, especially classic legal tomes, which have a smaller market than computer books, to make it economically viable for companies.
In the same post, a Berkeley grad student disses the experience of the Berkeley library system and lauds Google." Jo Guldi, the author of that blog entry, wrote:
I was idle trying a search on "roads" to see what sort of a literature would turn up for the period of my dissertation research, 1740-1850.
I didn't expect much. I've spent the last two years wandering through the Yale, Harvard, and California libraries, the British Library, Britain's National Archives, and the immense reserves of North American Inter Library Loan reading every book on London, pavement, or travel I could get my hands on."
For academic historians , this is turbo chargingwith online access to full text book.
What about books in Sciences, law, medicine and technologies , Mr Google ?