I was going to write something about this new Amazon feature which searches the contents of books now and not just ttitles, authors, etc... But Wired beat me to it. In fact, apparently they beat themselves to it, which is interesting in itself, but anyways.
Not withstanding all the politics and theories discussed in the Wired article and everywhere else, this feature is, or rather, will be, a boon for anyone with a book collection to which one often wishes to refer to.
This is just the beginning. Bezos has already shown an openness to open standards and has commuted that to Amazon itself. Witness TypePad's integration, and the ability for anyone to set up their own version using their API and some "simple" XML transformations.
I'll gladly give Amazon my credit card number if I can maintain a list of all the books I own, and be able to run a content search on them. Cross reference away, it's fine by me. As long as I can find the passage I'm thinking of and on which page it appears on. And if I can build my own interface to it, so much the better. It costs Amazon next to nothing, ups their mindshare and consequently will sell more books. Simple. Brilliant.
