Brewster Kahle was trying to get UNC involved in the Open Content Alliance for digitized public domain books while he was here for the Wilson Knowledge Trust meeting.
Now he announces that Microsoft Network will not only join the Alliance, but will commit to scanning 150,000 books in 2006!
Brewster’s brief press release includes a link to a Word version of the MSN release

The Open Library site which will house the collections has a very nice book browser.