Google and Amazon to Change Book Searching

ZDNet -10/29 - Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online, according to a report this week from Publishers Weekly's online site. Google spokesman David Krane declined to comment. But such a service would likely allow people to query a database for keywords and then view exerpts from books where those keywords appear, according to the report. So far, Google has made agreements that give it the ability to scan as many as 60,000 titles, the report said.

The discussions come after a newly introduced service from Amazon.com called "Search Inside the Book," which is similar to the one Google is reportedly discussing. Amazon's book search, which launched last week, lets people search millions of pages of books for keywords, view passages and purchase books directly from the site.

1. When I type "The Student Success Manifesto" in Amazon's search, only my ebook comes up now. In fact, the only way I can find to get to my paperback book on Amazon's system is by going to the ebook page and then clicking on a link. This is definitely annoying.
   
2. With the text of books being fully searchable, finding content online changes. Google would probably either integrate the book results with the Internet results or give it its own category. Either way, I imagine this would have a positive effect on the publishing industry as a whole.
   
3. The potential for book marketers to alter the content of books they're marketing to target specific key words or phrases is interesting. This is already widely done on web sites, but with books it may be a touchy subject.
   
4. Perhaps publishing companies will hire copy editors to create multiple versions of books with each version targeting a different key word. If done in the right way, I could see being a the top of a key word resulting in thousands of purchases over the course of a year.