You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book thats ever been published. Books still in print youd have to pay for, but everything else–a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe–would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

Source: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - The Atlantic