I mentioned in passing Amazon’s “search inside the book facility” in an earlier entry. At the time I was so caught up in what I was thinking about that I failed to register how significant Amazon’s innovation is. I remember some years ago the way that Altavista’s full text search capabilities transformed the usefulness of the Web. Amazon’s initiative promises to be still more significant in terms of making visible Gregory Bateson‘s “patterns that connect” in published books. This is big stuff.
What is disturbing is the obstacles that are going to be put in the way of the full promise of this technology being realised, because of a dog in the manager attitude to intellectual property. Amazon’s solution of showing pictures of pages seems like a sensible compromise, but there are still people advocating stopping them doing it on the grounds of infringement of copyright. This seems dumb on several grounds, not least that copies of books might bought that otherwise the buyer might not have known existed.
There is a good account of the technology and its significance in a piece Gary Wolf wrote in Wired and an example of copyright stupidity here. But if you haven’t done so already go to Amazon.com yourself and try it out – it is amazing.