That is the headline of Rafe Furst‘s blog post here, and that is the subject of his post as well. It is a very entertaining read (hardly surprising, coming from Rafe), especially as he leads up to describing the holy grail of Amazon free grazing: the Minimal Amazon Covering Set, about which Rafe has also set up a Wikipedia page. [ED.: See the comment below re: the removal of the Wikipedia page soon after this post was published.] Here is his description of the enterprise:
A set of keywords that lets you read an entire book for free on Amazon is a covering set (CS). If the number of keywords in a CS is less than or equal to that of all other CSs for the same book, then it is a Minimal Amazon Covering Set (MACS). There may be more than one MACS for any given book. (And yes, someone who is highly skilled at discovering these could be considered a “MACS book pro”).
He also addresses Amazon.com directly, asking just the right question:
Before you look to close this loophole, first check to see [if] your sales numbers are positively or negatively affected. Personally, I find it tedious and not that satisfying to read a book electronically and end up buying the book if I’m at all interested.
I am not convinced that Amazon would even consider this a “loophole,” though I am guessing that publishers might. But maybe I am too skeptical. Remember, I am the guy who wondered whether, if public libraries didn’t already exist, you could ever start one today.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Has anyone checked out http://www.scribd.com ? It looks like people upload (after scanning??) entire books, and you can either read them on the website using their viewer, or download them in a variety of formats: Word, PDF, audio, etc. I don’t know whether it’s legal or not, though.
For example, here’s the *full* version of Neil Strauss’s 2005 book “The Game”:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/231128/The-Game-Neil-Strauss
How do you think I read Freakonomics?
j/k
I just figured out how to search through the books using a bitwise OR symbol, which means that every page in the book can be found with just one search. They use the book TALES FROM THE TILTBOYS as their example in the blog. Go to that book and search for:
tilt | poker | hand | phil | bet | luck | odd | win | card | call | one | game | lottery | four | roshambo | kim
That will return every single page in the book at once without having to run multiple searches.
This can be used for any book. Think of keywords and just separate them by the | (pipe) symbol.
@ Stephen Dubner & #10
Try searching Freakonomics by copying and pasting the following:
economics | freak | this | you | test | school | with | fact | far | who | late | did | his | now
Now I’m not condoning reading this way, but there clearly are some problems with Amazon’s system. Still think that Amazon wouldn’t consider this a loophole?
I bet if Amazon went public with this, it would actually improve sales.
I know that I often read the first 20 pages or so of a book before deciding to buy.
I must not be the only one — Borders is filled with couches.
Why bother with Amazon when you can just use google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=-inurl%3Ahtm+-inurl%3Ahtml+intitle%3A%22index+of%22+%2Bfreakonomics+%2B%28chm%7Cpdf%7Czip%29&btnG=Search
You could also read an entire book in a brick-and-mortar store without paying (as with MACS, you might have to come back the next day if you get kicked out). I don’t think people consider that a loophole. This doesn’t seem much different to me.
Since the webpage was deleted from wikipedia, I added one sentence about the authors observation in this section.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Website