« Knowledge Management: U.S. or U.K.? Who Really Rules? | Main | Search OCLC with....Google? »
October 30, 2003
Amazon's Search Inside the Book
Books have been getting a lot of attention on the web this week. And for good reason. There is, obviously, a tremendous amount of information contained in books. But finding out which book has the information you need has almost always involved getting your hands on a copy of it. In this electronic age, this is not very efficient. Whereas journal information has been accessible in full-text electronically for many years. My guess is that, for that reason, journal literature gets much more use.
Leave it to Amazon to be the first to offer full-text searching of books.
Amazon has consistently added features to their bookstore that users of library online catalogs have always yearned for. And they've really done it this time. Now when you search for a book on Amazon, you will also be searching the full-text of over 100,000 books.
This is no small development. There is now content available to researchers that was for all intents and purposes previously invisible. To try out this new feature just go to the Amazon front page.
For more discussions on this topic, see the Web4Lib archives.
And the word is that Google is hot on Amazon's trail negotiating for similar content.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lawlibtech.com/cgi-bin/mt/mtb.cgi/13
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
