Steven Johnson of Slate on The Best Search Idea Since Google: How Amazon can make money from books you already own.
Amazon.com's announcement this week of its new "search inside" feature—allowing full-text searches of over 120,000 books in its new digital archive—will probably turn out to be one of those transformative Web moments when a tool suddenly appears and six months later you can't imagine life without it. For logical reasons, Amazon seems to have designed "search inside" to help readers find text in books that they haven't bought yet. But there's just as much opportunity to apply "search inside" to books you already own.
Amazon got it right with this one. I'm impressed and awed. I've already used this new feature this week to find references to my Bob Jones University dealings in 1998 contained in Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery.
Further, I'm intrigued by Johnson's concept of using this new feature as a means of searching your own personal libraries (or the portion included in the Amazon database). The internet just got a lot cooler.