from The Guardian
Off the shelf and on to the web
go to article

A new initiative, The Open Library, which will digitally scan actual pages of books in the public domain and making these available via the internet. This is digital preservation with a public service face - and a huge one at that. This parallels nicely with the Turning-the-Page project which selectively make available British Library collections through a similar web-based interface.

However, the one big difference between the 2 projects lies in that the Open Library project allows for specific word searches in the books scanned, hence enabling these older books to be more usable to the generation which grew up with internet technology.