BROOKE GLADSTONE: We are back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield -- author of two books, the vastly more successful of which is right now hovering about 65 thousand notches below number one on Amazon. But the online retail behemoth says that authors like me might soon be seeing improving sales, thanks to its newest technology. It's called Search-Inside-the-Book, and it allows users to search the contents of some 120 thousand books so far. The implications for publishing and research are obvious. It's been called "a stunning achievement" by Time Magazine, and Newsweek lauded it as "a lightning bolt from the future." Gary Wolf wrote about the new feature for this month's Wired magazine. He applauds Amazon for tackling the task of digitally scanning more than a million pages of text, but is far more impressed by the company's maneuvers around what would seem to be a copyright law nightmare.

GARY WOLF: They did it in an incredibly bold way. They simply asserted that they are not creating a new information product at all, and therefore are not really selling readers access to these books, and therefore, they don't really need any particular copyright permissions. Now-- they did clear it with the publishers of the books, and then the publishers said to Amazon, "Okay, here's a list of titles that you're welcome to include in the first stage of this program." This has made some waves, because there are authors who will look and see their books in there and think to themselves, well, I didn't give my publisher permission to sell electronic rights of my book to Amazon without giving me any more money. And in fact the Author's Guild has already raised these questions publicly. I think that those protests aren't going to go very far for a couple of reasons. One, I think Amazon is eventually going to demonstrate that this does help book sales, but two, most authors are also readers and researchers -- I'm both -- and we know that the value of having our work out there so that other researchers and other writers can refer to it, can see it, can know that it exists, far exceeds any tiny little bit of revenue that we might get from people reading a page or two on line.

BOB GARFIELD:By the way, you can't download an entire volume this way. The system is built, is it not, so that you can only get a sampling of any given work?

GARY WOLF: Yes. They have some pretty well-developed security features in there. You can consume about 20 percent of a total book. But even in order to consume that much of it, you have to run multiple searches. If you just run one search and you land on a certain page, and you start browsing forward and back, you usually get told that you can't see any more within a few pages in either direction.

BOB GARFIELD:If we've learned anything about the internet, it's that whatever is out there will soon become available on line, notwithstanding any legal obstacles in the way. Now that Pandora's box has been opened by Amazon with this technology, what is to stop others from procuring available electronic files of published works and just distributing them on line without any of the restrictions that Amazon imposes?

GARY WOLF: Yes. It's a really good question. Before Amazon announced this program, I heard about people who were considering digitizing all the copies of the books in their own libraries. Why would they do something like that with books they already owned? Because they wanted to be able to search them electronically, and they had no way of doing that. And in fact, there was some discussion among groups of people that I know about sharing access to these digital libraries. So the movement to put books into electronic form unofficially was already getting under way. Now-- Amazon comes along and says if you want to search a book electronically, check our archive first. Well, some of these programs have already sort of fallen apart, and people have decided to wait and see to see if maybe Amazon's solution will work better. What I'm saying is by creating a legitimate solution before there's been enough time and motivation for the illegitimate solutions to take hold, Amazon may be forestalling exactly the worst case scenario that the music industry has gotten itself into.

BOB GARFIELD:I said earlier that the implications were obvious, but there might be one that's less than obvious. I think it takes but a trip to any college campus to see that Google is not only the default research tool but probably the sole research tool for most college students and many others who depend on it, but conspicuously absent from Google is any search of actual published texts whatsoever. I gather that this bodes well for the return of books as a source for most of the research that's done by anyone.

GARY WOLF: Yes. It's a very comical situation, I think. They call books the dark matter in the information universe in the sense that web search engines make the most ephemeral and sometimes the most trivial sources the most accessible while keeping some of the most important sources, i.e., published books, invisible. This is one of the steps which bring us to a world in which books are re-united with all of their information brethren on line.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Gary. Well, thank you very much.

GARY WOLF: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:Gary Wolf is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and author of the new book, at this point not browsable digitally but analog available in wood pulp, Wired: A Romance. [MUSIC TAG]