Amazon's new search and potential copyright issues

For those of you who haven't heard, Amazon has introduced an amazing new service that allows users to search the entire text of over 120,000 books.

The Authors Guild has some (probably well-founded) issues with this. When I first read about potential lawsuits, I thought, "why would authors not want their works more accessible?"

When we learned of the program, we thought that it would be impossible to read more than 5 consecutive pages from a book in the program. It turns out that it's quite simple (though a bit inconvenient) to look at 100 or more consecutive pages from a single lengthy book. We've even printed out 108 consecutive pages from a bestselling book. It's not something one would care to do frequently, but it can be done. So a reader could choose to print out all the fish recipes from a cookbook in the program. Or the section on Tuscany from a travel book. We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.

Oops. Yeah, that's probably no good. Technology, Ho!

I decided to see how difficult it would be to snake some free recipes from a cookbook, looked up "Jamie Oliver pecorino," and clicked to see the excerpt. In order to do so, you have to log in, and then provide credit card information for "verification." Sorry, I'm just not motivated enough to hand over my credit card information to Amazon to look inside a book. It's like online bookstore porn!

So, it looks like Amazon has taken steps to ensure abuses are kept to a minimum.

via kottke