MemeMachineGo!

Holy crap! Amazon now supports searching the text of books.

I tried “Edison’s last breath” and Tim Powers’ Expiration Date was choice #2. “ten-point steel” and Slan was #3. “The winter of our discontent” and “The Tragedy of Richard III” was #103 (okay, okay, the deck’s pretty loaded on that one.).

And I tried a lot of less specific phrases and got a lot of junk. Right now you can’t distinguish a text search from a search on title, author, subject, and it looks like when it’s grasping at straws, it weights the results heavily toward books that are popular (not an unreasonable choice.)

I was corresponding with my friend Johnzo today, and asked him if he’d tried it. Forgetting that he moved to Seattle a while ago. And was working for Amazon. And not knowing he’d been working on this very project. Doh!

Boing Boing linked to this Wired article on the subject (from which I cribbed the entry title above.)

O’Reilly’s been doing something similar for some time, the Safari Bookshelf which allows you to search not only their collection of computer reference books, but a large number of books from other publishers. Then for as little as $10/month, you can keep a number of titles on your virtual bookshelf, and browse them to see the context of your search result to solve a given problem, or read them cover-to-cover. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while — $10 a month for all the O’Reilly you can eat is a good deal.

Why this Interweb thing might actually end up downright useful by and by.