No Searching Inside O'Reilly Books

from the didn't-expect-that dept

theodp writes "Even though he said he was 'blown away' by Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature, which allows Amazon visitors who supply credit card info to search and browse for words on more than 33 million pages of over 120,000 books, Tim O'Reilly has decided not to participate in the program for now. 'If they end up being a Google for published content...we need to think better about what publishers get out of it,' he said." The link is for the WSJ, so you have to pay to read the story. Anyway, this is a bit surprising since (a) O'Reilly is usually really open about stuff and (b) Bezos and O'Reilly are pretty close. As for O'Reilly's question, isn't "what publishers get out it" a lot more attention and potential sales? Already the Amazon search feature has made me add a few books to my wishlist.
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  • identicon
    John, 24 Oct 2003 @ 10:14am

    No Subject Given

    O'Reilly already allows full text searches for any of it's books within Safari (http://safari.oreilly.com/)

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Oct 2003 @ 10:46am

    Why post a subscription-only article?

    Why the F are you posting a story that only WSJ subscribers can read? Hello?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Mike (profile), 24 Oct 2003 @ 10:54am

      Re: Why post a subscription-only article?

      It was submitted and the story was interesting, so I posted it - and mentioned that it was sub only. I usually don't, but occassionally you make a decision. On your site, don't post to such stories, but on this site, it is my decision and I did so.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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