A reiterated call to Amazon
Some days back, Julie pointed me to Danah Boyd's blog (RSS).
This morning, she makes a call to Amazon, and publishers in general, to expand their text-based searching: have text-based searching capability on books that Amazon knows you own. She (and I) understand the copyright implications of a text-based search on everything Amazon offers but, obviously, once you've purchased the books, you already have permission to them.
The only thought/concern/question I have is this:
Amazon allows you to check a little checkbox next to books they offer to say “I own it.” While that would be perfect for those books you find at garage sales and random family members' houses that strangely happen to answer all of your latest questions, clearly that's much too easy to get around. I can't think of a way to get around this, other than having to purchase ALL of your books from Amazon to be able to text search them. I still love the idea, and I want it now, but I wonder how many people would use the option with that caveat.
Apparently enough:
Her post got a response from Ian Grove-Stephensen,
Well, I am a publisher (not in your area, unfortunately) and I'm listening. In fact I will go one step better - I'll put my entire list of 400 titles onto a public website as print-locked PDFs, so Google can index them. We've tried this with samples already and been really pleased with the results. We lose a few sales from people who then read them online, but against that we generate a lot of good will and a lot of site traffic we would not otherwise have had. It'll take about three months to complete the project, so watch this space!