So why not visualize places mentioned in books on a map? Now you can. Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you’ll find a map on the “About this book” page.
To see this in action just search for any book on http://books.google.com for example this Book on New York, when you click on the About this book page you get the places referenced in the book displayed on a map, along with the page references from the book.
Maybe i’m just a big geek … but I think its really cool!