Can I search the text of a G-Book^® like I can a traditional e-book?

For most G-Books today, the answer is No. Here's why:

Remember that G-Books are graphical reproductions of printed books, thus each page is essentially a photograph, not letters and words of text in a computer file, as is a standard e-book.

Traditional e-books do permit text searches, but at the price of denying you the original typefaces, layout, art, and other enjoyable aspects of the printed version of the book.

G-Books can also be made text-searchable by adding the text as an invisible layer behind each page's graphical image. G-Books that include this feature are listed in the Store as Search Text: Yes.

However, adding this text layer dramatically increases the size of a G-Book. In our opinion, that's too large a file for efficient downloading and easy transport at this time—except perhaps for short books.

As broadband speeds and storage continue to increase, we'll be adding more text-searchable G-Books, but for now we hope you'll enjoy G-Books because they work just like printed books, only on your computer screen instead of on paper.

Remember, those wonderful printed books weren't text-searchable either, and they were still very functional. Any scholarly book that had an index (the original "text-searchable" technology) still has the index in the G-Book. But plain e-books break the index of the printed book, because text-only e-books remove a book's original page breaks and make it into one long stream of text. You can look at the index of an e-book and see that a term occurred on page 317 of the printed book, but where is that in the plain e-book? So with a book that once had an excellent index to refer you to the relevant pages for one term or another, text search becomes the only way to search for the term, even it occurs many times more than the indexer would have listed it in a printed index; but you'll have to search every match of that term rather than benefit from the indexer's arrangement of the term into groups of pages and subtopics in the original index.

And for books that never had an index in their print version? Well, most likely they didn't need one, probably because they're fiction. Would you really want to search for each occurrence of the name "Carol Kennicott" in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, or would you rather start reading from page 1 and turn the virtual pages of a G-Book that best captures the experience of reading the printed first edition?

By the way, another problem with traditional e-books is that they too usually started out by being scanned from the pages of a printed edition. Unlike a G-Book, the traditional e-book applies optical character recognition (OCR) to each page to convert the graphical image into text, then throws out the pictorial and graphical content. If you've done any OCR processing (or read e-books that were "OCR'd") you know that it's far from perfect and requires a careful proofread to correct the nonsensical errors it introduces when the OCR software has to guess at a word it doesn't recognize, or when it "recognizes" the wrong word. A text-based e-book is only as accurate as the proofreader who read every page of the scanned files (if there even was a proofreader!). In contrast, a G-Book gives you a high-resolution snapshot of every page, so you're assured of every word being just as it was typeset—including even the original typographical errors that identify and make some editions especially valuable.