Amazon: Sales up from book search

Just a week after Amazon.com introduced a tool that lets people search the entire text of many books it sells, the online retailer reported a boost in sales as a result of the feature. The Seattle-based company said Thursday that its "Search Inside the Book" feature, which launched Oct. 23, lifted sales for searchable books by 9 percent, compared with titles not part of the in-text database.

The service lets people type in any keyword and receive results for all the pages and titles of various books that contain that term. In the past, Amazon customers could search only by author name, title or keyword. The search feature works with around 120,000 titles from 190 publishers, which translates into some 33 million pages of searchable text. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said the program is "driving increased sales," and since launching, 37 additional publishers have shown interest in participating.