Web critique: Amazon.com : Harnessing the full potential of the internet
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Wow. About one year ago Amazon.com digitally entered 120,000 books online (Article on this). Every single page of these books are available online.

It is a wonderful resource, especially for researchers or someone who wants as much information as possible on one particular topic.

Today I am looking through my favorite history book, A People's History of the United States (PHOTUS for short).


On Amazon you can find every book that PHOTUS cites, and even better, you can find every book that cites PHOTUS (i.e. every book that has been published since PHOTUS which cites PHOTUS).

This Wired article mentioned above, really explores the exciting future of books and human knowledge as a whole.

It is such a shame that greedy corporations like Disney recently increased the copyright laws by 20 years (with the passage of the 1996 Digital Millinium Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton) which was a huge step backwards for the progress of human knowledge. But this is a conversation for another day.

Update December 15, 2004
CNN: Google brings libraries into cyber-age
NPR: Google's Plan Prompts a Question: What's on the Web? (audio)

Los Angeles Times: Wikipedia