From today, Peter M shows me, amazon.com greets users with a letter from its CEO, informing them that they can now search by the contents of books, as well as by the title, publisher, etc. Registered users can then view the pages of books on which their search term has been found. A pretty powerful research tool, and finally a solution to that irksome 'I've read it somewhere' feeling. I wonder what this will do to the demand for e-books, and more broadly what the implications of this kind of centralised capacity are for the Open Source debate.

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