Amazon has just added the capability of dong searches on the entire contents of 120,000 books. Given this, you would think that they could then easily format them for sale as ebooks, publishers permitting.
I don't understand - please explain further? Do you mean you can search for things contained within books??
Go to Amazon.com to find out more - you can search for phrases within books. I do suppose Amazon could then convert them to ebooks... but they probably don't want to get into the business of creating the content to sell; they're just a retailer.
publishing content indices (probably a third party solution) is a long way from publishing each title as a formal secure eBook. i mean,... c'mon. use your heads and stop dreaming. :roll:
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Come on, davidspalding, it's worth a thought. You're right, though -- licensing issues would be an absolute nightmare for a company like Amazon. It's unlikely happen anytime soon, especially since .lit files keep on getting cracked -- it propagates the perception of ebooks as insecure.
Mind you, I'd love to see it happen -- I just don't see it being the case.
ha-ha, do you really think for a min. that the Amazon search engine has teh full text of 120,000 titles fed into a DBMS in a form that can easily be exported to OEBPS source files?
"Given this, you would think that they could then easily format them for sale as ebooks, publishers permitting..."
again, if you assume that someone OCR'ed 120,000 books into a huge DBMS, yeah, it's feasible. there's no given here. call up Jeff Bezos and ask him about the details. post back here when you have some more info. i'll be right here, holding my breath. :twisted:
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Current PDA: Casio E-125. Past: Casio CQ-1 c. 1977. Seiko UC-3000, c. 1986. Casio B.O.S.S c. 1991.
We all live in a Yellow Submarine.
not particularly relevant but Amazon have slightly modified this feature to make printing the text from books a little more difficult (by removing the "Print the page" link - or similar).
this was done to attempt to stop people from loading the pages of reference books, cookbooks etc. obviously the value of these books would be greatly reduced if you can browse the contents at any time from Amazon, lol... they're trying to slow down that effect (or keep it to a nice minimum).
New Amazon search feature
You're right, though -- licensing issues would be an absolute nightmare for a company like Amazon. It's unlikely happen anytime soon, especially since .lit files keep on getting cracked -- it propagates the perception of ebooks as insecure. 
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