As Far As I Can Tell

Recent feature additions to two of the most popular sites on the web have gotten me interested in the possibilities they’re hinting at. The first is Search Inside the Book at Amazon, a system capable of doing full text searches of nearly 120,000 books. For example, try searching through Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. From that link you can view the covers and table of contents. If you have an Amazon account you can search the entire book and view particular pages that contain your search. Note that you aren’t just reading web text — it’s an actual scan of the page in the book that contains your query.

Imagine the serendipitous finds that result when you realize that books on a topic you’d never look into contain references or passages you’re interested in. The boon to multi-disciplinary research is huge, and finding every forward or quote from you favorite author is a snap.

The other new service, now in beta, is Google Print. It doesn’t have it’s own tab on the homepage yet, but with it you can search for books, and even read the first chapter of many. Currently Google is the undisputed leader of information gathering on the web, but the web is only a fraction of our information resources. The troubling thing is that the since it’s far easier to use Google than your local library the marginal and often less credible sources from the Internet are the only ones we find.

Luckily the Google mission to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” doesn’t limit itself to the web. They’ve already delved into catalogs, and bringing more print based data online is going to make universally accessible information an even closer reality.

What I really like about these two services is that while they recognize the desire and need to search the entire text of a book, they don’t attempt to create e-book libraries. Contrary to the ideas of futurists in the mid ’90s, people have shown that print isn’t dead, and few people would want it to be. We love our books with their ink and paper. We love the covers that hold these packages of knowledge and beauty together. But sometimes we want to find information quickly, and during those times searching through our ink on paper would be a big help.

These services, especially Search Inside the Book, respect the physical object while giving us the added value of a digital version. It doesn’t replace the book, and has powerful restrictions built in to keep people who might try from attempting to use it as such. You can’t view the entire book at once, but you can get in to verify that what you need is there before purchasing.

This sort digital + physical compromise is the kind of technology that paves the way for a shift in what kind of information we think about finding online. There’s still excitement on the Internet.

See also:

• The Great Library of Amazonia
• Amazon shortcut spawns debate about future of books
• An example of how to return only books results at Google.