Link: The New York Times > Tech­nol­ogy > Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Data­base.

Google, the oper­a­tor of the world’s most pop­u­lar Inter­net search ser­vice, plans to announce an agree­ment today with some of the nation’s lead­ing research libraries and Oxford Uni­ver­sity to begin con­vert­ing their hold­ings into dig­i­tal files that would be freely search­able over the Web.

Next, I sup­pose you could set up an RSS feed to sub­scribe to spe­cific books (or even cat­e­gories: sci-fi, fic­tion, biog­ra­phy, etc.). You would sub­se­quently receive a cou­ple of pages or chap­ters per day, pay­ing for the remain­ing con­tent if you wanted to fin­ish the book.

To make this really work, eBook devices would have to improve to make dig­i­tal book read­ing a bet­ter expe­ri­ence (more here). Might Apple step up to the plate? After music, pho­tos and pod­cast­ing, The iPod could also accept RSS feeds for books. Either the screen would have to be enlarged … or with text-to-speech, you could opt to lis­ten to your down­loaded RSS book feed.

Via Joi Ito.