Calpundit
mentions, as just about everyone has heard, that Amazon has introduced a feature to allow you to do full-text searches on the books they sell.
Sure, its "only" 120,000 of their books, but still, this is a great leap forward, as long as the sticky issues of legality and copyright an be hashed out. I don't see myself the danger--it would be far easier to photocopy or scan a book, than to try and get significant portions of the text via this system of Amazon's.
And the search engine needs some work, but this is one of those small milestones of the digital age.
It's odd that, for example, different books in a series are and aren't in this database. (The Kushiel series, for example). It's too bad that the GBOA wasn't made searchable, or else this would be superlative for the Amber community.
On the other hand, one can search Carl Sagan's COSMOS and find that, in that book at least, he does NOT use his famous phrase "billions and billions"
Posted by Jvstin at October 26, 2003 9:24 AM