Make books searchable in Spotlight…

Posted at May 14, 2005

…without giving me the actual book. Simon Willison writes: “The thing is, you don’t need a digital copy of a book to be able to search it; you just need a full-text index of it. An index isn’t enough to reconstruct the book, but it is enough to answer questions like “on what pages of Eric Meyer on CSS are float layouts discussed?”

Very interesting. This makes my head spinning!!! Imagine if I could search every book I buy from Spotlight?! Without having the actual books on my Mac? Simon points to Tim Bray’s On Search, the Series, for explanation on how this could work.

This is clearly the next thing Amazon should add to their list: When I buy a book they already have scanned, indexed and made searchable on their site, I should be able to buy a Spotlight searchable index for the whole book for an extra dollar. I would pay that! Everytime.

And Steve Jobs, this is your chance. You have a whole year (or two) before other OSes get search tools like Spotlight. In the meantime, have Jezz Bezos over for a talk, and start putting those indexes on Amazon.com

books, mac, search

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