"Google" Your Books

Las

t week the search for weapons of mass destruction suddenly became a whole lot easier — if you happened to be hunting for them at Amazon.com. The No. 1 online bookseller just added an astonishingly clever feature called "Search Inside the Book," which turns the site into the Google of literature. Every page of some 120,000 in-print titles has been scanned into a vast computer database and can be accessed as text. This doesn't mean you'll be reading your favorite best sellers on Amazon for free; there are limits on how many pages you can browse in a single book. But it does mean you can do the kind of comprehensive search that most librarians would give their Dewey decimal systems for.

Enter weapons of mass destruction into Amazon's search box, for example, and you don't get only the dozen or so books in print with WMD in the title. You get all 1,690 books in the Amazon collection in which the author wrote that phrase — including such unlikely sources as On Writing by Stephen King or The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. A couple more clicks and you get an image of the page where the phrase appears (and, if you choose, two or three pages before and after). Care only about books that discuss WMD at length? Amazon is smart enough to remember which books were bought by other readers who did the same search, and to rank those titles at the top of the list.

The upshot is probably the most useful tool for shoppers, scholars and bibliophiles ever invented. In fact, there's no reason why you can't use the service to search books you already have on your shelves. No matter how fast you try to thumb to and from the index pages, Amazon's computers can do it faster. Now you know how Garry Kasparov felt when he was beaten by a chess program.

The only downside is that before you can look inside the books, you have to either have an account already or give Amazon a credit-card number for "security purposes," which might keep a lot of kids and teens away. While this is a nod to publishers worried about people gaining too much free access to their literature, it's a shame. What Amazon would lose in sales by being used as a kind of gigantic Cliffs Notes, it would gain 10 times over by becoming widely known as a search destination (just ask the highly profitable Google how important that is)--in other words, a weapon of mass education.