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Originally published October 27 2003

Greedy book authors don't want Amazon to allow full-text search

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

This is what's wrong with western society: too many authors deprive the public of their knowledge by not even allowing basic searches of their book content. This ego-centric materialism harms society at large by isolating people from information that could help improve their lives.

I have fought hard against this kind of materialistic approach to publishing by keeping my articles and books entirely free of charge and available to anyone.



The Authors Guild, a professional organisation representing US writers, is recommending that some authors block their works from appearing on Amazon.com's new full-text search tool. In an email alert to members, sent on Friday, the Guild argued the tool could eat into sales of certain types of books, including cookbooks and reference texts, and advised that some authors might do well to have their books removed from the service. Controversially, the group argues that publishers' contracts don't entitle them to take part in the service without the author's permission. The service, dubbed "Search inside the book", lets users type in any keyword and receive results for all the pages and titles of various books that contain that term.


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