There’s books still being designed.

People would never search for horror books produced in Los Angelas between 1980 and 1990. (maybe scholars would, but not ordinary readers). They are more likely to have fuzzy criteria in mind. Serendipity is a better value to cultivate, but that involves an element of randomness and social sharing. Perhaps there is more value in user-generated folksonomies than something a creator could provide.

With regard to Jesus Wept, as a literature buff, i would be most interested in seeing echoes of this sentence in other literary passages. We need a way to collect annotations on a book.

One more thing. i highly recommend Jack Matthews: BOOKING IN THE HEARTLAND (1986). It's a visionary look at the book.

Indexing is an art and a science, and good index creation might be automated somewhat, but the final proof is in a human trained to understand metadata and its importance.

I'll eventually do more posts about this, but your point is correct.

Keep talkin', Mike, we're listening…

One: Fiction is written to provide an experience that begins at page one and ends on the last page (for the most part). There are plot twists and other developments in my work that would come up in searches and spoil the experience I'm trying to provide to my readers, for example. There are many other aspects that would be ruined if you didn't read a book linearly.

Two: For metadata searches to work as you've stated here everyone would have to have open access to eBooks. No one would be able to sell an eBook because it would already be open to the public. Publishers might find another way to make money, they're harder to crush than people give them credit for, kind of like cockroaches, but writers would starve. I make my living selling my eBooks for very reasonable prices (under $8.00 US), and my readers are happy to read them on their mobile phones. I've also never had a complaint about the price.

Metadata will become an integral part of finding the eBook you want. How we search for literature will change, what we look for in literature may change a little, but there will always be people who want to read a BOOK. That is to say, they'll start at page 1 and finish on the last, not search for one tidbit after another through random volumes that have been made a part of a searchable database that treats fiction, with all it's colour, invention and style like parts of a bloody overgrown encyclopedia.

Oh, and as for the devices, they're in their infancy. With regard to searchability, most good reader software makes eBooks easily searchable and is linked to a dictionary or encyclopedia so you can do an instant word lookup while reading. They're getting there, but as with any new concept it'll take time. Perhaps you could create a working model of your idea? Sounds like you could become something of a publisher yourself.