Amazon has a new way to help you find books to buy. (Borrow them from the library if you don't want to buy. Scott Library's interlibrary loan service can get it for you if it's not already in the collection.) A few years ago year they introduced Look Inside the Book, which allowed users to view pre-selected pages of participating books—usually the front matter and an excerpt.
Search Inside the Book, released last October, greatly expands on that tool by allowing registered users to see the pages relevant to their search. Entire texts are searchable, so type your term and it tells you the number of times it appears in the book, with links to reproductions of each of those pages. (Google is experimenting with a similar feature, Google Print, but it's still in its early beta phase.)
Not all books are susceptible to this powerful new search. Authors and publishers must first give Amazon.com permission to display their copyrighted material. In turn, Amazon.com protects their content by limiting the number of viewable consecutive pages, and preventing the browser's print command from printing the pages. (Savvy users will be able to get around the print restriction.) Look for the "search inside" graphic at the top of book cover images. If it isn't there, it's not a participating book. If it has the "look inside" graphic, you won't be able to search the full text, just browse through the pre-selected pages.
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Amazon.com search results. The book pictured at left participates in the Search Inside program; it's fully searchable. The book at center does not participate; although you can browse select pages, this book won't come up unless the search terms are in the title, author or subject. The book at right does not participate in either program.
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See the scanned pages that contain your search string.
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If this seems amazing, note that there are many non-commercial efforts at bringing electronic book full text online. Check CyberCafé's books section for a list of some of them, including Project Guttenberg's classics and the NCBI Bookshelf's biomedical materials. Also note that Scott Library has subscriptions that license Jefferson users to search and print the full text of core medical texts in the STAT!REF and MDConsult collections.
In the card catalog days, searching for a book meant knowing the title, author, or an approved subject heading. Electronic catalogs made the task easier by allowing keyword searching—especially useful if you don't know the first words. They also opened the door to enriched cataloging, such as table of contents information, to increase the chances of finding what you're looking for. The logical next step is to search for terms in books where we do for web pages: wherever the author put them, in the title or on page seventy three. Search Inside the Book lets us do that for a huge number of copyrighted books previously closed to the online searcher. Or, at least for anyone who gives Amazon.com their credit card number.
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