The British Museum has finally released the beginning volumes of its project to digitize historical manuscripts from its collection. On the Turning the Pages site, you can actually see and turn the pages of several great books, from Leonardo’s notebooks, to a 14th Century Haggadah, to an ancient Qur’an, to the beautiful Herbal by Elizabeth Blackwell (the copy was King George III’s personal copy). The revolutionary software (it uses Shockwave) lets you click to turn the pages of the books, then magnify them to read. This is truly bringing libraries to the people.

http://www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/digitisation1.html

Just the thing to browse during my lunch hour.