This article about Amazon negotiating to provide searches of nonfiction book text makes me clench my teeth. The undergraduate audience that we are targeting knows that the web doesn't have the authoritative information they need but are impatient and want their information delivered to their dorm room (suddenly the citrus orange and green logo of Kozmo* comes to mind). That audience will be thrilled with this service. While there are certainly enough students who are happy to practice scholarship, there are also the students who just count those citations. Who cares if Amazon only shows a brief snippet? It's simple to collect far more citations. It's tempting to point out this audience won't buy the books, but Amazon won't care. The students will make an order for CDs or DVDs and perhaps even a whole Target order that sufficiently covers the possible search costs Amazon might incur.
* Ah, I wish Kozmo had been on the list of sites the LC asked the Archive to specifically crawl. We would have made an effort to get behind that log-in with a covered zip code and would have saved the list of ice cream, soda, paperbacks, etc, for posterity before the wake began.
Posted by judielaine at July 21, 2003 07:05 AM