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(of extracting information from text) I'm not sure how to better explain it than that. It's not indexing like a card catalog had years ago, a title summary, Google's is actual full text indexing, even though returned results are crippled.
A purchased book cannot be searched in the same way, nor can a collection of one's purchased books be searched in the same way. Only the books in Google's "library" or system can be searched.
I've got several thousand books at my home. Not one of them is searchable, nevermind all of them. Why not? I paid for them. Since I've purchased those books, and have full access to their text, no crippled or partial results or pages missing, it somehow seems I should be able to search them. But no. Not possible without more digitization than I care to do.
If I purchase an ebook from a publisher, it's most usually encrypted, so once again, it's still not searchable from my own various computers, though it can be "unlocked" for the purposes of reading it, and that tool used to "unlock" it may offer some rudimentary search capability on the single platform the unlock tool runs on. But what if you want to perform a search not just of one book, but every encrypted book you've ever bought?
IF publishers sold their books in unencrypted form, it shouldn't be too much work to put them on a home server (not for public access, just for internal use), then they can be searched from any computer in the local network.
Since most books are not sold that way, why not just use a Google search instead when one is looking for information.
I suppose it would be possible for Google to have a system where if you purchase a book, they could offer purchasers full-text search rights in perpetuity.
Look at Amazon Kindle. Amazon can delete a purchased book in the customer's supposed "possession" at Amazon's will. Sure, they recently reversed that decision (you have to "request" that it be reversed), but the capability is there. Is that "Kindle bookshelf", and all the books contained therein, text searchable from one's other, desktop computer, or the laptop, or the kitchen computer (for recipes)? And what Happens when Amazon comes out with Kindle 2 or 3? Will Kindle 1, and all the books it contains, be like the useless Analog TV I have sitting around here that's no longer able to receive any local broadcasts, because all broadcasts are now digital?
Google built a better model for extracting specific information from text. By doing so, they've obsoleted older ways of getting information, such as purchasing a book for a slow, deliberate reading, where 99.9999% of the words read are not specifically what you were looking for at that moment.
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