Net Results: Internet users got a fabulous new Web research tool last month when Amazon introduced its "Search Inside the Book" feature.
Well, perhaps, according to some. As so often when a new service or technology is introduced on the internet, it all depends on who you talk to. And also as often happens, there's already been some wing-clipping going on with features of the service, because of fears that Web users could take advantage of this new bounty.
Inside the Book Search - which seemed to come out of nowhere, with no advance hype - is a service on Amazon's website that lets you search for keywords or phrases inside the books Amazon sells. Just type the words into the new Search Inside the Book search box on the site and in seconds you get a listing of books that Amazon sells that refer to your words, along with the citation.
You can jump to look at the citation - which brings up the actual page of the book - or you can go to one of the books returned and ask the search feature to return every instance of your search terms within that single book. Yes, it truly is an extraordinary service and incredibly fast.
The first time I tried it, the service brought back memories of the first time I tried the then days-old Web search engine AltaVista, in the mid-1990s. Google, which has long since eclipsed AltaVista, was similarly gobsmacking.
Undoubtedly, with Search Inside the Book, Amazon has inflicted another blow on bricks-and-mortar booksellers.
One of the drawbacks of online booksellers has always been that you can't pick up and riffle through a book, read a few sample pages, or check the index to see if the book covers the topics in which you are interested.
Book Search not only demolishes that drawback, but offers something a shop simply cannot provide - the chance to check not just what's in a single book but, in seconds, find every book in the store that might dovetail with your interests.
Very cool, but I still prefer the shopping experience of a bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
Amazon is fantastic for specialist books, discounts on hardbacks, researching what's on the market and for sending gifts abroad to the US or the UK since, in either place, I can order from local sites and pay local shipping charges.
But when I am picking out poetry or fiction or non-fiction or children's books, I like to browse, handle the volumes, stumble on something new, smell that bookshop smell, and meander in the quiet presence of like-minded book lovers. And I enjoy supporting neighbourhood bookshops.
That said, Search Inside the Book is a winner and will no doubt encourage many impulse buys of books you might never have known existed.
Amazon already says that books in the programme - 120,000 volumes from 190 publishers, with 33 million pages of searchable text - have experienced a 9 per cent jump in sales. So why wouldn't authors and publishers want their books in the programme?
That's a question that lies at the very heart of tensions over online content, copyright and privacy issues.
Already, several authors have apparently asked to have their books withdrawn from the programme, according to some publishers and US-based writers organisation the Authors Guild. Not because they don't want their books to be searchable, but because the service allows pages to be copied and printed from the searchable books.
The Guild said it was able to print 20 per cent of a single book when the search service first launched. Within days, this capability was modified and now only a few pages can be printed.
In addition, a viewer can only look at two successive pages of an online book, so you can't sit and read the latest Stephen King straight from the Amazon site.
What will prove most fascinating about this service, in my view, is that Amazon will be able to provide real data on whether offering free content online actually helps spur the sales of books over time (a few weeks is too short a time to draw conclusions from any initial spike in sales).
To date, producers and publishers of content of all kinds - music, film, print - have feared such an approach will damage sales and lead to wholesale piracy.
Just as Apple's music store is offering the first evidence that such assumptions aren't true in the music world, Amazon looks likely to soothe fears in the print world that digital access always means loss of sales.
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