Jill Murray
I can’t believe so many file-sharing sites were shut down so quickly by the music industry, but the publishing industry has collaborated with Amazon.com on its “Search Inside” option, which allows you to essentially read a whole book online without buying it.
I’m not complaining. I’m just amazed. Grateful. Because “Search Inside” just saved me from a terrible cupcake emergency.
Here I am in Montreal, convinced that I brought my favourite cupcake cookbook with me to make late birthday/mother’s day cupcakes for my family, but when I get ready to bake, the book is nowhere to be found. I assume it’s still in Toronto.
I try calling the rapper, so he can email me the recipes, but his phone is off. So I sulk for a few hours and go work on something else– installing a new library feature on this web site. (Soon to be revealed!)
The process of building the library leads me to Amazon.com to search for ISBN numbers, and while there, I am reminded of Search Inside. A little bell rings in the distance, and I think to look up my missing cookbook. It’s there. It’s searchable.
Five minutes later, I have created myself a handy file of recipes, which I can now cook from, without troubling the rapper any further.
I have no qualms about my methods because I own the book. But if I didn’t own the book, it wouldn’t have been much harder to find (aka steal) what I wanted. It may have taken longer to search without remember recipe names, but the whole process would still only take about 2 minutes, and 5 simple steps:
- Find the book on Amazon.com
- Click “search inside”
- Peruse the index for a recipe that sounds interesting, taking note of the page number
- Conduct a search on the page number of the recipe
- Voila. Perfectly usable copy to bake from.
That’s a lot faster than going to the library.
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