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Amazon Plan Would Allow Text Search Of Books
emmastory writes "The New York Times is running a story (free registration required) about a new development at Amazon - they plan to assemble "a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction." Users would only be able to read a certain portion of the text from any one book, but it sounds promising nonetheless. The Times article suggests that this is part of a larger strategy to compete with Google and Yahoo by making Amazon an authoritative source of information on everything book-related."
Interesting idea... Now go patent it quickly before Amazon wakes up :)
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Of course this *could* be great for college paper researchers, looking for a quote or two to stick in a research paper.
Take that one (not very big) step further - it will become an absolute treasure trove for those lazy students who can't be bothered to do their own work and just blatantly plagiarise. I'm not talking about the people who discuss their results with others or work together, but the minority who just blatantly cheat.
Whether people are prepared to admit it or not, the availability of everything as raw data (ie. text) and the cut/paste mentality has been creating a real problem; more so at university level, but it is certainly filtering down.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)