Related link: http://www.lucenebook.com/
I was visiting with Erik Hatcher at the Rails gig in Reston last Saturday. I really like what he has done with his book Lucene in Action (which he coauthored with Otis Gospodnetić). Essentially, he created a search engine for his book on Lucene with Lucene. You can’t get all the content of the book, but you get plenty. I think it is a really cool way to present a book, a sort of recursion on the topic itself, by showing how quickly the contents of the book can be searched using the means described by the book. Whoa! I also think it says a lot about how books could be presented from now on. If writers and publishers don’t do something like what Erik is doing with his book, we are a little behind the times. I intend to follow Erik’s lead in making books more accessible to readers, as early as possible.
Did you check out lucenebook.com?
books need search
Search is especially important for tech books. Safari Bookshelf[1] provides this for their collection. You can search the whole pool or a single book.
I like that the Lucene in Action search uses page numbers and section heading to organize results. I believe this is essential when wading through dozens of hits from a book. Last I checked, Google Print search does not do this.
Here's my own contribution to the topic. It is a HTML portal page into a PDF document. It provides quick links into the PDF's sections and a full text search box. Search hits are vividly organized by section:
http://pdfhacks.com/pdfportal/pdffile.php?pdf=/eno/BE.pdf
You can download the PHP code here:
http://pdfhacks.com/pdfportal/
Sid
[1] http://safari.oreilly.com/