Blackhacker

Google is light years ahead of anybody else. Their willingness to experiment with tech and give there engineers the opportunity to work on pet projects is going to be the difference. An example of cool stuff they do is this.

This is from Google Blog

Google Print is an ongoing initiative to scan printed material and put it online where it can show up in Google search results. We’ve expanded the program, and we’re now inviting publishers to send us books that we’ll scan and put online for free. There are many, many books out there, and the process of scanning takes time, but depending on your areas of interest, it’s likely you’ll soon be seeing more Google Print results when you use Google.

To test it out, I did a google search on War and Peace and got this link at the top.

You get a scanned image of the first page. You can read up to 3 pages. They have links that let you buy the book from amazon, BN, Booksense (I have never heard of) or find seller through froogle. They also have sposored links (of course) which features free Cliff notes online (which is how I used to read book in school anyway (you know you did it too)