The Change Mariner

The Great Library of Amazonia

Wired:

Jeff Bezos is building the world's biggest digital book archive. It's an info-age dream come true -- and the best way to sell books ever.

... The notion of Amazon scanning all of its books but allowing users to search only those they own is a clever way around the central barrier to creating a digital archive: Copyrights are distributed among tens of thousands of publishers and authors. But when Manber told Bezos his idea, he found the Amazon founder ready to work on a grander scale. Bezos wanted his customers to be able to search everything.

In his small, ranch-style Palo Alto house, Manber and I sit side by side at a table near the kitchen as he begins typing my queries into his laptop. The computer is connected to a prototype of the archive, which at the time of my visit is scheduled to go live in a few weeks. Within seconds, I am captivated. The experience reminds me of how I felt a decade ago, when I first began browsing the Web. Back then, the Web was still small, and most of my time was spent peeking into the homepages of physicists and engineers. Even so, the power of the new network was unmistakable. The thrill didn't come from the content of the pages but from the structure of the Web itself, its obvious scalability and ease of navigation.

Amazon's new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it's still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.

The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York's most famous pillager of public money. Manber types "Boss Tweed" into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.