You may have heard that Google is in the process of digitizing the books in several large research libraries. How can this be of value to someone who does not want to sit in front of a computer to read a book in its entirety? One big value lies in the capability it affords to search the text of all those books for a word, term, phrase or name that you are interested in. You are given the page number in the book where your term appears and in many cases you can go right to that page. Because of copyright or publishers restrictions the text of many of the books is not available, but you do get the citation, page number and often a few lines of text and can find out what libraries or booksellers have a particular book. Give Google Book Search a try.
