Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books

This is bound to create a lot of controversy: Amazon.com is negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction…it plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.

The plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers’ time and attention.

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