now you can easily copy text from Google Books references
I noticed this a few days ago and now found an official announcement at the Google Books Search Blog with the catchy title:
Greater access to public domain works for all users
If you hadn’t already noticed, Google Books is a treasure chest of useful info for genealogy research. There is literally a flood of books coming online on a regular basis, fully text searchable. Many of these are books now in the public domain that have sat in libraries untouched for years. Many of these fully searchable books may not be the kind of book think of for genealogy research, and that makes this all the more valuable as a tool for finding facts in unusual places.
Until now, even if a book was in the public domain you couldn’t do more at Google Books than read it online or download a PDF file. I’ve spent hours trying to re-type text or extract it via OCR for my genealogy research.
Now they’ve added a feature that is designed to make the material more accessible for handicapped users who use text readers. This also makes the material more accessible for use on the Web, in school reports, and for saving text from books into your genealogy program.
