Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Wonders of Text Searching

I took my wife to the mall last night. While there, we stopped in the book store. She was interested in a book called Feed Me, I'm Yours, which she read about in the discussion forum that she frequents. We asked the girl behind the counter if they had the book and where you could expect it to be, and the computer revealed that it was in the store and located among the cookbooks. We searched the entire rack, and I even went back to search it again, but we could not find the book.

At that point, I began to reflect on how easy it is to find items like that book online. Looking for that book amongst all of the others on that shelf, having to pull books out when their spine isn't clearly labeled is so, well, analog. We never did find the book, but when I got in to work this morning I decided to search for it, and it came up on the first try: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/068402862X/qid=1138191222/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-0252250-6755205?s=books&v=glance&n=283155.

Believe it or not, even though I am a gadget geek, I have not entirely adopted ebooks yet. When I am sitting at my computer, I can always find other things I would like to be doing than reading a book. I haven't really found a free ebook reader for the Pocket PC that I like yet either. uBook isn't bad, but still has a long way to go in formatting. I tend to stick to the freeware/open source side of the spectrum because my wife would flip if I tried to drop $15 to $30 on every single program that I thought was cool or highly useful.

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