In China-US Million Book Digital Library, output of the digitalization process is more than one terabyte of text in OEB and PDF format. To access these data quickly and accurately, we are developing a distributed terabyte text retrieval system. To solve the interoperability and extensibility among different information resources, we introduced our solutions of three kinds of metadata schemes. Furthermore, because of the complexity in Chinese language, we made an approach in word segment methods to increase the efficiency and response time of the DL system. In the testbed, we put an extra layer in the cache server and designed a new algorithm based on VSM. With the query cache, system can search less data while maintaining acceptable retrieval accuracy.