[jkn]

It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most important benefit from the project: the ability to search these books. I've been researching a history of science subject recently and it's amazing the amount of information I could get from Google Books and nowhere else online. And where the snippets are not enough, I have the book title and author name, so I know where to look for the information in print.

[greglindahl]

The public benefit of searching the books isn't fully realized, alas, until more than just Google can see all of the text. Here's an example of a book discovery tool built using the Internet Archive's scanned book collections:

https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...

https://books.archivelab.org/dateviz/?q=Gregorian+Calendar&y...