I mentioned in July that Amazon was developing a new text search. A couple of days ago they launched this “Search Inside The Book” feature. Now users can search not only book titles, but also all of the text contained within Amazon’s books.
While this may at first seem an innocuous usability enhancement to Amazon’s site, Wired magazine’s Gary Wolf treats the development much more seriously – and I agree with him.
“The Amazon project … represents a bold step toward the dream of a universal library,” says Wolf. “This shifts power away from the people who own finite sets of copyrighted material and toward the people who offer access to information about where this material can be found. Information about books, not ownership of copyrights, becomes a new center of power.”
Incidentally, just how did Amazon get around the tricky issue of copyright?
“Amazon's solution is audacious: The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all … 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.”
The message here isn’t just that Amazon is changing the way books are sold. It’s much bigger than that. One medium, the web, is changing the function of another, printed text.
It’s a paradigm shift, a metamorphosis that reinforces our feeling that cultural evolution is accelerating, that the internet is a catalyst for that acceleration.
It’s exciting.
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