The author goes on to take credit for Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Narnia as examples of steadfastly waged total war against Muslim evil. Good grief…

Why are we telling you this story on a blog about Google Book Search? Because this project was born out of the passion for discovery. There’s an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, history and culture contained in the world’s books. We’re inspired by the idea that with every book we index, we’re building a better tool for people to find books and make these discoveries. Some will be personal, like when a reader from South Carolina found a book thcontaining a photo of his great uncle, delighting his housebound father. Others will be more…er, esoteric, like when a blogger decided to use Book Search to find references to the phrase, “Snakes on a Plane.” And others, like Luca Mori’s, will unexpectedly expand the frontiers of human knowledge.

On that note, we’re excited to announce Inside Google Book Search, the official Google Book Search blog. This blog is about discovery — yours and ours. Here you’ll find members of our team sharing thoughts, tips and the occasional announcement about Book Search. We intend for this to be a place not only for Book Search enthusiasts, but also book lovers of every stripe.

That’s the spirit! Here at What’s New for Book-Lovers, a service of Nimble Books LLC, we’ve been watching Google Book Search closely. We have 17 books live and more in the pipeline. We’ve tried a little bit of everything, from prototyping ad-supported books to “living books” that anticipate what’s new with Dan Brown and Harry Potter.

We’re guessing that this blog opening means that GBS is about to launch its online access program. We’ve got 17 books ready to sell that way; we’ve marked them at the same price as our standard e-books available elsewhere. Our most optimistic assessment is that GBS’s online access program is going to be roughly the equivalent of adding another major e-book outlet on the scale of Amazon.com. Amazon e-books account for about 25% of Nimble Books’s revenue, so that’s nothing to sneeze at!