As the year comes to an end the Million Book Project has reached its goal of scanning and making freely available a million books! This project is spearheaded by the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Sciences and University Libraries, with a number of partnerships including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States National Agricultural Library, the National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education in China, and the University of California at Merced who negotiated to acquire copyright permission for the books which are not currently in the public domain.
So far the project has scanned 1.5 million books in 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic and Telugo. The books have also been scanned using OCR to enable full text searching. The project also collaborates with the OCA, acknowledging that both are working towards the same goal of making content easily available to everyone.
You can learn more about the project here, and can access their catalog here.