Word: amazon
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...billion, and it's growing at a rate of 35% a year--far outpacing any other advertising medium. What's more, Google, the reigning sultan of search, is looking vulnerable. The combination of big money and big opportunity has attracted some mighty big players, including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. There's a street fight brewing over Internet search that will make the browser wars look like thumb wrestling...
...least it did until Jeff Bezos intervened. On Oct. 23, the Amazon.com CEO (and TIME's 1999 Person of the Year) unveiled a new feature called Search Inside the Book. Amazon had spent the spring and summer digitally scanning 33 million pages--that is, every page from more than 120,000 in-print titles--and putting them in a vast searchable computer archive. Before on Amazon you could look only for names of books; now, to the chagrin of some authors, you can pinpoint a text reference on the very page where it appears and call...
...course, Bezos is not running the archive as some kind of nonprofit virtual library. He's improving our access to books because he wants to sell us more of them. Only registered Amazon customers may use the service (registration is free but a credit-card number is required). Even the most determined searchers will not be allowed to see more than 20% of any single book. The idea is to turn us all into bibliophiles by showing just how many authors have written about whatever topic we desperately need to know more about. The first few pages are free. Once...
...offer us the inside of every book, Amazon has a long way to go: the Library of Congress holds 19 million tomes, and about 3 million are in print. But Bezos is off to a blazing start. To go the distance, he's appealing to authors' dreams of immortality. Let us digitize your work of genius, he tells them, and the reading public will have access to it forever. Soon Amazon hopes to start its own publishing service, serving up fresh copies of any title the moment you ask for it. The phrase out of print could soon lose...
...only downside is that before you can look inside the books, you have to either have an account already or give Amazon a credit-card number for "security purposes," which might keep a lot of kids and teens away. While this is a nod to publishers worried about people gaining too much free access to their literature, it's a shame. What Amazon would lose in sales by being used as a kind of gigantic Cliffs Notes, it would gain 10 times over by becoming widely known as a search destination (just ask the highly profitable Google how important that...