Some people don’t like Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’

The Seattle Times has a report that trade book authors (many of whom do pretty well out of Amazon) don’t like the new Search Inside facility because it might enable users to get the key piece of information they are seeking without having to buy the book. “The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead.

The new feature may have other problems: Each search allows the user to see the full-text of the page where the keyword appears, plus two pages forward and two backward. But savvy searchers can actually read more of the book.

In an e-mail to its members, The Authors Guild, the country’s oldest and largest society of published authors, said it was able to print out 108 consecutive pages from a best-selling book by using key search terms.

An attempt to use the method yesterday successfully called up more than 150 pages of a travel book.”

Yeah! And I can also dig my garden with a teaspoon.

Update:According to Wired, “Amazon.com’s new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales.”