Amazon knows everything

Amazon.com has blown my nuts off
once again. This is an excerpt of the letter they posted on their front
page today informing users of their new search feature:

Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word
inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search
Inside the Book -- the name of this new feature -- searches the
complete inside text of more than 120,000 books -- all 33 million pages
of them. And since we've integrated Search Inside the Book into our
standard search, using it is as easy as entering a search term in our
regular search box.

I know there are tons of Orwellian implications to this, but damn if I'm not just totally impressed. That is cool as hell.
Update:

Wired has just put up an article
on Amazon's project. Goes into detail about the scanning process and
how it's done, but it also discusses the ramifications of this
"Alexandrian fantasy".

"The publishing industry has made great strides since the
Roman era. Movable type was invented in 11th-century China, then
reinvented in 1450 in Germany. In 1886, Ottmar Mergenthaler created an
automatic typesetting machine. In 1983, we got desktop publishing. But
publishers continue to edit books using four colors of pencil, and the
idea of freely accessible digital files conjures nightmares of a
peer-to-peer disaster among media corporations. Things are even going
backward � Barnes & Noble recently announced it would stop
selling ebooks.
"It's shameful," Kahle continues, "because we have the tools to make
all books available to everybody. You need three things. Technically,
you need storage and connectivity. Storage is easy. For under $10
million, you can store all published works of humankind back to the
Sumerian tablets. The last time they tried this was in Alexandria, and
they had an innovative storage mechanism, too. They had papyrus, and
papyrus was astonishing compared to clay tablets. But we can do better
than the Alexandrians, because we also have connectivity. I have
traveled in Uganda and in rural Kenya and seldom been more than one
day's walk from an Internet caf�. It is technologically possible for
most kids in the world to have access to all the books in the world."
Amazon's Alexandrian scheme hinges on the insight that physical books
can be turned into electronic databases and then � in the retail
process � turned back into physical books. This is one of the boldest
maneuvers yet in an intense commercial competition, but for all its
cunning, this is a civilized, even civilizing war, one that builds
libraries rather than burns them."

This is a staggering development that could potentially change
everything about the way we relate to books and the written word. No
doubt this colossal library will be appropriated by corporations and
held ransom for a few years, maybe even a few hundred years. But
someday all this knowledge will be available to anyone who wants it.

In this context of change, confusion, and fear, Jeff Bezos
is forced to behave like a politician. Talk of a universal library
elicits no enthusiasm from him. When I mention it, he counsels caution
and patience. "You have to start somewhere," he says. "You climb to the
top of the first tiny hill, and from there you see the next hill. It's
difficult to see what's beyond before you have climbed the first hill."

For better or for worse, the Alexandria Project is to books what
Napster was to music. The floodgates have been opened once again.

Posted by flow Frazao on October 23, 2003 at 01:50 PM | Permalink