One thing that really amazes me when you start to study Japanese, and many other disciplines as well for that matter, is how productive human beings are, and the shear mass of literature that has been produced over the years. Some of that literature is great, and some is not so great, but the disappointing thing is that those books go out of print, and so people can't always benefit from the hard work of previous generations. Hopefully in the future projects like google books and similar will help to address this, although corporate greed often stands in the way. Personally I think copyright terms should be much more limited. And I know if I was an author and my book had long been out of print, I would much rather the material was freely available and people were using it, than have its availability restricted due to overly restrictive copyright laws.

Sometimes when you look at an old textbook you think, "how the hell did anyone learn anything from this book?!", and then you look at another book and you think this book is way better than some of the newer textbooks. One thing that especially applies to textbooks in some other academic discliplines is that they have got so damn big !!!! Some of the older books seemed to be a lot clearer and really just highlight the main ideas rather than bombard the student with too much information.

Anyway I really enjoy browsing through books at bookstores, libraries etc.

Recently I found this site
http://www.trussel.com/jap/jbooks01.htm

Although it is just a list of someone's collection of japanese books. I enjoyed looking through it, and they have scanned a couple of pages from each book so you can get an idea of the style (I only wish the complete work was available online, maybe someday!).