There has been much excited discussion recently about Amazon's new initiative to make a certain number of books searchable (c. 120,000 and growing). The best coverage we have found is a feature that Wired News are running called The Great Library of Amazonia by Gary Wolf.

He starts with an historical comparison:

"The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Through centuries of aggressive acquisition, the librarians of Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of thousands of texts. None survives. During a final wave of destruction, in AD 641, invaders fed the bound volumes and papyrus scrolls into the furnaces of the public baths, where they are said to have burned for six months. "The lesson," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, "is to keep more than one copy."

The piece goes on to look at Brewster Kahle's work with the Internet Archive alongside the new Amazon initiative, pointing out a clever distinction that has allowed Amazon's Jeff Bezos to get away with the project without attracting opposition from publishers:

"The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all. "This is not an ebook project!" Manber says. And in a sense he is right. The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures -- pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume -- which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon. Users will be asked to give their credit card number before looking at pages in the archive, and they won't be able to view more than a few thousand pages per month, or more than 20 percent of any single book. "

Clearly the Amazon initiative is an important step in making books more accessible online, and it is doing something complementary to Kahle's own "Million Books Project" that digitises out of copyright books. But as Kahle points out: "Amazon is taking a cut at the commercially available titles," continues Kahle. "We are going for the public domain titles. But who is taking care of the orphans [books whose copyright holders are unknown]? Nobody."

Hopefully, what we are seeing is just the beginning of a new lease of life for the books we hold in our libraries and collections.

Try the Amazon search-in-a-book - it is amazing.

UPDATE: Google might also be getting in on the act.