Holy crap, google booksearch is amazing

I just used Google booksearch for the first time, and it worked perfectly. In fact, I’m kind of amazed that I haven’t used it before now.

I’m the type of guy who will remember snippets of sentences, complete with adverbs and conjunctions, but have no idea where it comes from. In this case, I even knew what book it was from. The book was sitting open on my lap.

I was flipping through the book, slowly realizing that the only way I was probably going to be able to find this snippet was to read the whole damn book again, when it occurred to me that I could try Google. I plopped my sentence into the search field, and the result popped up at the first spot. Page 99.

I flip to page 99: there it is. Bingo. Amazing. Why the hell would any publisher want out of this service?