Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a new service that lets bookworms search through pages of thousands of books available on its online store…The search feature works with around 120,000 titles from 190 publishers, which translates into some 33 million pages of searchable text.
For a more detailed description of this service, read the Wired story by Gary Wolf, “The Great Library of Amazonia“: ” The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures — pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume — which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages in the archive, and they won’t be able to view more than a few thousand pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book.”
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