Amazon.com has launched a fantastic new tool, a digital database that users can search for words and phrases in a text — not just the title or author. The new feature creates a reference library of sorts, including about 33 million pages from more than 120,000 books. This is a great resource for journalists searching for information.
On Wired.com, Gary Wolf takes a more in-depth look at this project: “To build the archive, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has had to unravel a tangle of technological and copyright problems. His solution promises to remake the publishing business and give Amazon a powerful new weapon in its battle against online competitors such as Yahoo, Google, and eBay. But the most interesting thing about the archive is the way it resolves the paradox of the book, respecting its physical form while transcending its limits.”
The Author’s Guild is already up in arms about this. “When we learned of the program, we thought that it would be impossible to read more than 5 consecutive pages from a book in the program,” The Guild said in a statement posted on its Web site. “It turns out that it’s quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy book. We’ve even printed out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. It’s not something one would care to do frequently, but it can be done. So a reader could choose to print out all the fish recipes from a cookbook in the program. Or the section on Tuscany from a travel book. We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title — and the presumptive increase in sales — offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.”
