Amazon, the Google for books?
Amazon has announced its latest services -- gourment foods and Search Inside the Book which allows visitors to search more than 33 million pages of some 120,000 books and counting according to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required) which also says that this may inspire a new kind of vanity search -- the search for your name in a book:
To produce its huge digital catalog, Amazon worked for months to get book publishers' consent to participate in the program. More than 190 publishers -- including Bertelsmann AG's Random House, Time Warner Inc.'s Time Warner Book Group and Viacom Inc.'s Simon & Schuster -- agreed to let Amazon post electronic copies of some of their books on their site.
Amazon executives believe the search capability will encourage more purchases of books, the same way an earlier Amazon feature called Look Inside the Book, which lets users browse a handful of pages of books, stimulated sales. "This is really about helping customers discover books in a way they could never before," said Steve Kessel, Amazon vice president of North American media products.