Google has a book search that reveals a surprisingly large amount of content for each book. The poker books I searched for all had multiple chapters intact and ready to view in an easy to read format. Some books had the entire book online.
Not every poker book is available, but they have a nice selection. It seems like some of the newer and more popular books aren’t indexed though. I’m not sure there’s a reason behind this or if it’s just a coincidence.
It’s likely they don’t have all the content, or even some of the indexes / chapters because that would violate existing US Copyright Law.
Google’s digital copying has been under fire from numerous groups. With good reason. They’ve gone into some of the largest libraries in the world, digitized them, and made them available online. Why is this a big deal? Because they’ve now made content available for free that most ppl would only be able to borrow (through a library) or they’d have to buy it.
So anyways, in some cases the copyrights have expired and those books are now considered part of the public domain, others, where only certain portions are shown, are not. And if you notice, Google encourages you to purchase said books. I think they have links directly to Amazon or something.
Sorry if that didn’t make complete sense, its 7:30 am and I’m tired.