] Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several
] large book publishers about an ambitious and expensive
] plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the
] texts of tens of thousands of nonfiction books

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think it could be really useful to find out if a particular piece of information that I'm looking for is in a book somewhere (especially if I can't find it elsewhere online). On the other hand, one of the most frustrating things in the world is to get a search engine hit on some info I need, only to find out that I'm then expected to buy an entire book in order to see the one page I'm interested in (which may or may not even have exactly what I was looking for in the first place!). It sounds like Amazon is considering some sort of limited "context" searching though, so it might still be useful.

Something else that doesn't get mentioned in the article, is how libraries fit into the mix. I haven't yet found a good "all libraries in the country" database yet, but there are a few good starts out there, where I can type in the title of a book, and get a listing of every library in a certain area that has that book available. A natural next step, would be for libraries to offer the full text of all of their books online to their local communities... Are Amazon and Google and book publishers going to protest that when it happens? I dunno . . .