Imaging being able to find obscure citations by searching the entire contents of a library (all those books!) … from a computer terminal.
Now imagine doing it from your home, when the library is “online” at Amazon.com. That’s the idea behind Amazon’s latest project, launched last week.
This tool allows you to search 33 million pages of 120,000 books — and this is just the beginning. These are not eBooks — what is returned from the search are “pictures” of the pages, not unlike Amazon’s “look inside” feature. There are limits to how many pages a customer can search, both on a per book and calendar year basis.
Links: Authors Guild; Search Engine Watch; Seattle P-I; San Jose Mercury News; Reuters; Amazon press release, letter from Bezos, and FAQ.
