More on Amazon's Search Inside the Book

WIRED News is reporting that Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" service does not allow users to "print pages from within books."

Technically, it appears what Amazon has done is fool browsers into not showing the scanned image of a book page when you try to print from your browser. For instance, when using Safari on MacOS X or Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows, if you try to print a "Search Inside the Book" search result page, you get everything from the Amazon web page except the scanned image from the book itself.

Interestingly, Amazon has added a noRightClick() JavaScript function on these pages, so you can't Right-Click on a page image and save the image to disk, something that was doable ten days ago when I first wrote about Amazon's new search service in Nettle here (I guess someone at Amazon was paying attention!).

Of course, the NoRightClick thingie can be defeated by simply disabling JavaScript (at least using Safari). The RightClick menu works with JavaScript disabled, and you're able to save the image to disk or view in a new window. And if you open the image in a new window, you can then print it no problem. Posted by brian at November 3, 2003 03:16 PM | TrackBack