Over on ResourceShelf

http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/10/18/cornell-joins-microsoft-book-scanning-project-and-other-scanning-news-and-tools/

news (via News.com) of Cornell joining the MS Book Scanning progam which is part of the Open Content Alliance with Yahoo, the University of Toronto and others. The University of California System is part of both MS and Google.

Last week, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison joined the Google program.
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2006/10/13/search-briefs-university-of-wisconsin-madison-joins-google-library-program-clip-and-snippet-cultures/

This post also has info about several service, mostly free, that offer access to full text books, many in PDF.

For example:
The International Childrens Digital Library
http://www.icdlbooks.org/

***Check out the cool search interface****
http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SimpleSearchCategory

Turn the Pages (virtual turn pages of books)
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html
http://www.openlibrary.org/
http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp.php

Many more listed.

Microsoft also made a deal with with Kirtas Tech for their scanning tech.
http://www.kirtastech.com/Index.asp

Here's a video (2004) of the book scanning robot:at the Univ. of Toronto
http://www.archive.org/details/scanning_robot

and an interview with a person who does the scanning.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113111987803688478-VNpw62xi_JA4avE8cxOZf0pf_nM_20061109.html?mod=blogs