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Amazon's Book Search Hits a Snag

Posted by timothy on from the oopsie dept.

The Importance of writes "Yesterday, Slashdot readers discussed Amazon's brand new, technically impressive and highly useful book search feature that lets users search the full text of over 120,000 books. Today, the Authors Guild is saying that the publishers don't have the right to let Amazon do this. Uh oh."

3 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. odd way to read by potpie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I understand the technical reasons for this... but there is no practical reason, since it would probably be very hard to read a book this way.

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    Esoteric reference.
    1. Re:odd way to read by Wingnut64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A service that allows Internet access to a scanned image of an arbitrary page of any book is just begging to be misused.

      Good thing people don't put thousands of books in a big building and let people read them for free. It's just begging to be misused.

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      echo 'Header append X-HD-DVD "0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0"' >> /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
  2. Re:Ohhh what by shog9 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I spent quite some time looking at tech books on Amazon last night, and can't honestly say I'd be thrilled if it were possible to read 10-20 pages at a time from a technical book I'd written.

    As opposed to, say, going into Barnes & Nobel and drinking coffee while reading the whole thing free?