“Just a week after Amazon.com introduced a tool that lets people search the entire text of many books it sells, the online retailer reported a boost in sales as a result of the feature.” – CNET.
The TeleRead take: Too early to say for sure. Also, it would be interesting to see what’s happening to individual titles such as reference books.
Update: An Amazon news release quotes customers, including one in Vancouver, Washington: “During the past weekend, I entered a search for a favorite author, Jean Pierre de Caussade, and was surprised to find that, instead of the usual thirteen listings I usually find, there were eighty-one listings. These listings included not only books authored by Caussade, but also books by other authors that reference him. I was able to access pages in these books that refer to Caussade. You could see all the pages on which his name appeared. I thought this was a wonderful innovation by Amazon.com. I was able to find three books, which I have already ordered, that I would not have found without this new searching capability.” Let’s hope that’s representative.
