This may have already been covered, but I couldn't find any reference to it. An interesting article on the Wired magazine web site by a researcher, contrasting using Google Books to do research vrs using traditional libraries:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/...-google-books/
An excerpt from the article:
Quote:
I’m a science writer at Wired.com, but I’m also working on a book about the history of (what we now call) green technology. My book puts a topic front and center that has been hidden in the footnotes of the American energy story. And without Google Books, I’m not sure it would have been possible to write it. At the very least, my contribution to the book world would have been smaller and shallower.
The searchability, accessibility and breadth of the Google Books collection do not just portend some future best-ever digital library. It’s already the best resource for research that exists.
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And he goes on to chronicle his experiences trying to track down arcance references in libraries vrs on Google Books.