The Bottom Line

The Google Books project is an interesting and ambitious endeavor. While the prospect of having all the world's printed books available online is deceptively attractive, it's also somewhat impractical. Google can't, after all, make available copyrighted material without the permission of the book's copyright holders. This means that most of books in print today won't be available for reading online, at least not for free.

As such, the value of having book content searchable but not readable is debatable. You can try Google Book Search for yourself to see what you think, but be prepared; a lot of the information you find will be tantalizingly out of reach.