Amazon's New Book Search Feature

Search and Read over 100,000 Books on Amazon

Amazon.com's new book search feature now lets you search the text of most books they sell.

When I read about this new feature, I didn't realize the full benefits of it. Not only can you search the page, but you can read the full page and keep reading the next few pages of the book. Now that I've had a chance to use it, I wonder if it really will cause sales to decrease rather than increase. Amazon makes it tricky to keep reading more than a few pages ahead, but I was able to read at least 50 pages of a book. That's quite a bit more than the trial chapters some authors will give you as an incentive to buy their book.

From an Author's standpoint, I think they should put even more restrictions as to how many pages someone can view from a book. The good news is authors do have a choice about including their books in the search.

But cheapskate tactics aside, it will help you narrow down your choices if you know you want a book on a specific subject and you can't tell the difference between the books available.

Benefits: A try-before-you-buy feature for books on Amazon. Makes it a lot more appealing to buy books online.

Disadvantages: You can only read a few pages at a time. Come on! You didn't think they'd let you read the whole thing for free, did you?!

Conclusion: Visit Amazon, do a search for a book and check out this feature.

For a live demonstration, do a search, then browse one of the results. Visit:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/external-search?tag=search08-20&keyword=copywriting&mode=books