Many of us probably already use Amazon as a bibliographic resource for finding texts. But the good news is that yesterday, Amazon launched "Search Inside the Book," enabling full text search of 120,000 books from their standard search bar. See the FAQ to learn more about how it works. And read The Great Library of Amazonia, an article from the upcoming December issue of Wired which explores the project in more detail.
Note that I've found it useful already for doing research. Search results offer a pdf view of the page containing the search query with the query highlighted.
Links courtesy of a post yesterday and one today at Open Access News.
Amazing
So...How'd they do this? Do they have all the text from all these books entered into some giant database? I guess they must have scanned them all in...Wow.
All this knowledge, and they're only using it to sell books? Think about how valuable something like this would be to scholars.
re: Amazing
"Think about how valuable something like this would be to scholars." What do you mean "would be?" We can use it. As I said, I already have :)
A Fascinating Beginning
With 120,000 books scanned in and online, Amazon has made an impressive leap into relatively uncharted territory. Unfortunately, as it is with all explorations, you find yourself wishing the directions were a little more precise. With the introduction of a massive amount of material, the Amazon crew should take a long look at how that information is sorted and presented. The ranking and ordering of the texts can seem arcane at best, but resorting the search results loses the direct links to the text that are listed in the first search.
However, this is only the debut of Amazon's efforts, so I fear I may sound like I am judging them too harshly on small details. This is hardly the case. The work Amazon has performed could possibly take online scholarly research far beyond the confines of the Citation Index, allowing new sources to be revealed and and inspiring connections to be made. I'm very interested to see how they continue with the issue of "orphaned" texts, for both scholarly and personal reasons.
Actually I don't think that y
Actually I don't think that you are judging to harshly. While I was impressed with the new feature, the first thing that I thought was "Gawd, nobody's gonna be able to use the damn thing!". Well, actually it was my second thought after "Cool!" :evil: