This fall, Amazon plans to launch a free search engine for non-fiction books. Users could search on any term across the range of books from cooperating publishers. The return list would show which books contained the term, with one sentence of context per hit. Registered users could then request to see several pages of context. The software would strictly limit how much context any single user could see. The plan requires a full-text electronic edition of each book in the index and Amazon is apparently willing to pay for scanning the books that do not already exist in electronic form. While many publishers are cautiously consenting to the plan, a representative of the Authors Guild asserts that authors will deserve compensation for giving readers this peek at their work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/21/2003 09:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
