However, from what we can tell after looking at cached versions of OpenLibrary.org, material has been available here for some time. Here's a cached page from Gigablast (2005) and The WayBack Machine from January 4, 2007. The page and content that's live today is the same as what we see with the cached versions of the site. In fact, some of the books were also added to The Wayback Archive in late 2006. Example.
Does it really matter? No. It's likely today what the official launch and the ars technica article is a worthy ready.
Of course, don't forget that MANY public libraries offer access to services like NetLibrary (full text NEW books) and ebrary. In fact, ebrary also offers a service with free full text access to over 20,000 books. You just pay to print a page or save it to your hard drive.
Postscript: How could we post about ebooks and note mention the following AMAZING resources:
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
