The Great Library

An article in the New York Times Magazine examines the effort to put the contents of all books online in a searchable form. I haven't actually read the article, since it's a typically massive piece, so I apologize if anything that follows is redundant. Also, I sent an e-mail to my brother, noting that this will make a great World Wonder for the next version of Civilization.

Anyway, the timing of the piece is excellent, because I have just been struggling with the non-searchability of some books for a paper I'm writing. I read a passage about Jains in one book, and remembered a similar point in another book. I couldn't just search it for "Jains," as I could if it were online. Actually, the index can be seen as a crude way of making a book searchable. I went through the index and flipped to each mention of Jains in the book.

The problem is that with a computer search, you can play around with the terms to narrow your search. In my case, I wanted the term Jains within the same sentence or paragraph as "political upheaval" or some similar term. Once again, indexes try to approximate this by breaking down major topics so that you could look up Jain, and then under that look up "political upheaval and." In this case, the index didn't have that feature.

I guess my point is that indexes are quite crude for these purposes. Even for books that I already possess, searchability will be a great time-saving feature. I can't wait for the future, when I should be able to enter the 5 or 10 books I'm working with into the service, and then search them all at once for any particular topic I like.