Wired story on Amazons Search Inside the Book. From Wireds upcoming December issue more about Amazons Search Inside the Book featureI put some quotes I found interesing below Im guessing it will cost more than million to make all published works available and searchable electronicallyMost important its still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query books have remained a dark region in the universe of information We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web On the other hand we still want them to be books The copyrights to these titles are spread among countless owners How was it possible to create a publicly accessible database from material whose ownership is so tangled Amazons solution is audacious The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all Its shameful Kahle continues because we have the tools to make all books available to everybody You need three things Technically you need storage and connectivity Storage is easy For under million you can store all published works of humankind back to the Sumerian tablets The last time they tried this was in Alexandria and they had an innovative storage mechanism too They had papyrus and papyrus was astonishing compared to clay tablets But we can do better than the Alexandrians because we also have connectivity I have traveled in Uganda and in rural Kenya and seldom been more than one days walk from an Internet caf It is technologically possible for most kids in the world to have access to all the books in the worldThe third item on Kahles list has nothing to do with technological knowhow its simply political will Here he finds the situation mixed We live in an open society in which the concept of widespread knowledge is embraced as a goal of governance he says Just look at our libraries Public libraries spend billion a year academic libraries spend another billion Thats the good news The budgets are hard evidence of a public commitment to the Alexandrian ideal But on the other hand almost none of this money goes to digitizing books [LISNews.com]
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Amazon to Launch Search Engine. web ad.vantage Oct 23 2003 10:25PM ET [Moreover - Online search engines news]
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The Great Library of Amazonia. Jeff Bezos is building the world's biggest digital book archive. It's an info-age dream come true -- and the best way to sell books ever. By Gary Wolf from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
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