Amazon just added full text search of books - 120'000 and growing. This makes many of my books much more useful, especially those with crappy indexes (which would be most, unfortunately).
Apparently Udi Manber (Amazon's Chief Algorithms Officer) already imagines how users would take pictures of their bookshelf and let them search all the books they own. Cool, "Search my room", I always wanted that (but actually for non-book material, too). Another interesting information point: Scanning a book nowadays costs about one dollar. Not very much, but unfortunately destructive (they have to rip off the spine of the book).
Some visions of paperless offices included the scanning and archiving of incoming paper material. The paperless office never caught on (as a smart person once noted, if you had invested in paper companies when the paperless office was announced, you'd be rich now), but the combination of RFID-stamps on incoming papers, effortless scanning and the universality and intuitiveness of search sounds like a powerful combination to me. Especially to me :)
Posted by seefeld at October 25, 2003 17:41