Reply #150: NOT!!!!!!!

[theHandpuppet]

I take it you are an infrequent user of the public library and/or the Google digitized library? Because I'm a FREQUENT user of both and you, sir, are full of it.

There may be millions of scanned books in the Google digitized library but only a percentage of those are available for public viewing. There's this little thing called COPYRIGHT in case you've forgotten. Only those books not still covered by the publishers' copyrights can be read online, which means most of the books available via Google are at least decades old. This is handy for me as a researcher/genealogist as I can locate materials even from the 19th Century but unless you want to PAY to read, newer materials -- i.e., books published within the past few decades -- are not available for public viewing. So not only are new books unavailable, so are atlases, microfilms, collections of local histories and small editions, many maps, newspapers, etc. Currently there is no *free* online library that comes close to offering the services of even a small town library.