One step closer
Amazon.com announced today the availability of a new service. “Search Inside the Book” allows you to search the full text of 120,000 books, in addition to conventional searching by title, subject, and author.
You could already view select pages from these and other books at Amazon.com. Now you can find them by searching their text.
This is pretty cool, but it’s only a start. Cyberpunk writer Neal Stephenson presented an amazing vision of the library of a rather bleak future in his novel Snow Crash. (Like David Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds, Snow Crash also told us what the web could be before it had become a global nervous system for commerce and culture.) Stephenson’s library had the ultimate user interface: a very savvy humanoid librarian who could give you a personalized education on any topic upon request. This quaint bookworm even wore gum-soled shoes and had bushy eyebrows.
Not that I like the idea of doing away with the sensory experience of walking the stacks, thumbing through volumes, the smell of dusty, yellowing paper. But the heady concept of a library without limitations or barriers to use certainly has its appeal. 
