The information age has produced an explosion of content for people to read. This content includes traditional media such as books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, manuals, guides, references, articles, reports, documents, etc., that exist in print, as well as electronic media in which the aforesaid works are provided in digital form. The Internet has further enabled an even wider publication of content in the form of document downloads, such as portable document files and e-books.
Given the vast sea of content that people encounter, it is not uncommon for a person to read something and later recall a memorable phrase or subject, but not remember the exact source of the phrase or subject. The person may attempt to obtain recently read items in an effort to find the phrase or subject, but searching these items in this manner can be tedious, time consuming, and unfruitful. A person may also simply wish to research a particular subject in a set of books or other content that the person owns, has read, or is otherwise aware of.
Separately, various search engines have attempted to catalogue Web pages available on the Internet. However, given the enormous amount of content published electronically on the Internet, searching the entire Internet for a phrase or subject in a particular source the reader recently read can be similar to finding a needle in a haystack. The reader may have to wade through pages and pages of search results provided by search engines, and in the end may still be unable to locate the desired source. Moreover, the desired source may not have been published on the Internet in the first place, and thus would not be included in this type of search.
Electronic searching of public library catalogs is also known, but such searching is limited to bibliographic information and other meta-information that describe the library content. Full text searching of public library content is not available, and even if it were, the search may produce results from sources that are not of interest to the user.
Moreover, once a source is located, a user may wish to access the content from the source. For example, a user may access electronic images of one or more pages of content from a book or other work. A challenge arises when a provider of electronic content is under a constraint to limit the amount of content from a source that can be made available to users. A provider may be permitted to provide access to portions of content from a source but not the source content in its entirety. For example, a provider may enable users to preview the content of a source by browsing through a portion of the content. In some cases, the portion to browse may be selected by the individual users, and in other cases, the portion to browse may result from a search for content as discussed above. In yet other cases, portions of the content from a source available for browsing may be dictated by the copyright holder and/or the provider of the source content. While traditional digital rights management (DRM) schemes have been used to control access to source content as a whole, traditional DRM has not been used, nor is it adaptable for use, in controlling access to portions of content from a source, especially where the portions of the content are not known or specified in advance. Accordingly, what is needed is a method and apparatus that enable users to access portions of content from a source, yet limit the amount of the source content that is provided and thus prevent unauthorized efforts by one or more users to obtain the source content in its entirety.