Yesterday Amazon.com made the full text of 120000 books searchable. If you want to find books that mention cybertext, for instance, search books for cybertext, just as usual. The day before yesterday that search listed books with cybertext in the title. Today you also get all the books that mention the word. And a link to an image of the page the word’s on so you can see the context.
Wow.
I first saw this in Blogg og bibliotek. They’re librarians, and enthusiastically complain that libraries are constantly playing tag to catch up to Amazon. Danah Boyd points out something I’ve often thought: finally, books are becoming as easy to search as the web. Such a relief.
