If you want to learn more about how the Federal Circuit has applied the suggestion / motivation requirement, take a look at Harold R. Brown, Finding Motivation, Teaching, or Suggestion in the Prior Art, 86 J. Pat. & Trademark Off. Soc’y 809 (2004).  Brown carefully canvasses, and categorizes, the recent cases.

In today’s New York Times magazine section, Kevin Kelly offers an account of what he calls “the moral imperative to scan” books into digital searchable, linkable, taggable, etc. files. The essay is called “Scan This Book!”

According to Kelly, the “chief revolution birthed by scanning books” is that “in the universal library, no book will be an island.” As Kelly explains,

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Kelly makes a number of interesting points.  You know the saying: Read the whole thing!