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The National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is working with book publishers to adapt life science textbooks for web use and linking them to the PubMed biomedical bibliographic database.
The first book made available in this way is Molecular Biology of the Cell, 3rd ed. By B. Alberts, D. Bray, J. Lewis, et.al.
If you hope to replace the cost of a textbook with a free online version, that won't happen here. A book used via PubMed has been broken down into units of content based on the organization of chapters, sections, etc. You will not be able to view these pieces sequentially--from first page to last--as you would if you were reading the book. The entry point for a user is a page linked appropriately to a relevant PubMed abstract.
How to locate a book section.
Users search PubMed in the usual way. For example, I did a search on "DNA damage." When the abstract view of a desired citation is displayed on the screen, a small "Books" link in the upper right hand corner will appear if appropriate. Clicking on "Books" displays the abstract with certain phrases highlighted, e.g. "T-cells." The highlighted phrase links to sections of a book providing background information on the phrase. In this example, it links to a book section titled "MHC Molecules and Antigen Presentation to T Cells." One more click and you are reading the relevant book section. In the book section you may look at one or more pieces of information, however a navigable unit is, currently, about 1% of the book content. It is not possible to jump from one section of the book to any another.
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How did NCBI do this?
Fans of indexing will be quite pleased by the new system created by W.J. Wilbur and colleagues at the National Center for BioTechnology Information (NCBI). The system carves up the text from a book into all possible one-, two-, and three-word phrases and throws out the little stop words ('the', 'of', etc.). This list is compared with all the PubMed abstracts and titles and the list is edited to remove phrases that do not have useful meaning. Finally, a statistical weighing system is applied. Each PubMed abstract is then linked to an appropriate textbook section.
PubMed is seeking authors, editors and publishers interested in linking a book to the database.
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