Today Amazon launched its service for full-text searching of books. Currently it applies to 120,000 books from more than 190 participating publishers. That comes to more than 33 million pages, and undoubtedly Amazon will add more over time. The first search will show all (participating) books containing the search term. Users may then pick a book and follow-up and search for all occurrences of the term in that book. Search returns provide a small amount of context for each hit, and registered users can preview a limited number whole pages. While the preview pages are images, Amazon still highlights the occurrences of the search term on each page. The service is built in to every Amazon search box and supports phrase searching (but nothing more advanced). For more details, see the Amazon FAQ or press release. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/23/2003 03:59:00 PM.
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.
