Books...Google-style

I think Google is going to show up at my apartment one day and digitize me. They are unstoppable.

A friend and colleague of mine was raving about GoogleBooks to me the other day, so I decided to give it a look. WARNING: be prepared to spend some time!

One of the nice things about this book search engine is that you can tell it to return "full view" books. Most of the newer books out there and probably most mainstream fiction is only available as a preview (which is useful in its own right).
But...if you search the "full view" books you can find some really neat things.

For example, I put in "Patagonia geology" as the search term and Darwin's chronicles from the Beagle was right there!

So, this is great...perhaps you are one who makes yourself stay in your office and work instead of getting sidetracked by random books in the library. Well, now you can get even more sidetracked sitting at your desk.