Amazon.com now offering full-text searching for over 120,000 books?!

OUP.com might have one cos we publishing him soon, oyez. I prrofchecked a catalogue with his mug in yestaday

I think it's terrifically exciting. I'm afraid the first thing I tried searching on was 'Belle and Sebastian'. There were at least two novels mentioning them. Amazing.

I'm assuming that no scanning is going on, as that would be mentally cost ineffective. They are getting the text files from publishers, yes?

Plus a local Bellmore luncheonette was the site of a Supreme Court case involving pornography and minors, and there used to be a jazz club called the Mandalay (and here I am thinking all Bellmore used to be in the '40's was potato and carnation fields!)

You'd think. Really, most publishers aren't set up to provide good scans of pages & stuff, just as, say, random kitchen equipment company isn't necessarily set up to provide good product photos for ecommerce websites. You need images that are big enough, have uniform contrast, etc. From a local paper:

More than 190 publishers have permitted having their books scanned for searching and viewing on Amazon's site. Plans call for expanding the number of fully searchable books, Kessel said. He wouldn't say how many titles Amazon stocks but characterized the searchable 120,000 books -- about as many as the average real-world bookstore carries -- as a "very relevant" portion of the full catalog.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/145281_amazon24.html

If they've scanned 120 000 books with an average of what, 200 pages each at least, and then OCRing them (and checking them?) so that they can be searchable, that must take so much time and money I am totally baffled about about the whole project. It is my conclusion that Amazon are in league with dark forces.

I tried "It was the best of times, it was the worst of time" and what was the first hit?
Naturally it was: Time Management from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System for Taking Control of Your Schedule and Your Life

Somehow I suspect Amazon's server is laughing at me behind my behind

It still doesn't like my debit card though, so I can't view the actual pages. Are any other non-US people having this problem? I've bought stuff with that card on amazon.com before.