What is a book anymore?

Google has scanned in tons of books. There seems to be many pages available of the books. I don't know what is involved to see the complete book.

The Open Content Alliance has a lot of stuff. These are the people with the Wayback Machine. Their collection has a web search interface. In due time all the works of mankind will be archived here. In addition to scanned books there are also audio and video file in the library. I found Anton Chekhov, Madam Bovary and Don Quixote radio shows for download.

Microsoft is halting their project to make book available electronically.

What is this all about?

Where to find the library(s)? I find it interesting that it is easy to find the web articles about the library scanning project but the URLs for the content is never referenced in the articles.