Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.

Amazon plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read, and it is telling publishers that the plan will help sell more books while better serving its own online customers.

Together with little-publicized additions to Amazon's Web site, like listings of restaurants and movie showings, the plan appears to be part of a strategy to compete with online search services like Google and Yahoo for consumers' time and attention. Providing a searchable online database of the contents of books could make Amazon a more authoritative source of information, drawing additional traffic to its online retail store.

A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to comment and would not confirm any of details of the plan. The publishing executives said Amazon had asked them to keep the plan confidential until the start of the service, which was scheduled for the fall.

Amazon is calling its program Look Inside the Book II, the publishers said. It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter or a few selected pages provided by the publishers of certain books. But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms like "Caravaggio," "sans-culottes," or "Osama bin Laden," and then see a list of books mentioning the term along with the sentence that contains it. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around that citation.

But to see those pages Amazon would require users to register, and it plans to limit the amount of any single book a browser can view.

The publishers said they have been guardedly cooperative. Some said they were willing to let Amazon experiment with works of narrative nonfiction, but not reference books, cookbooks or poetry where shoppers might be satisfied with the few pages produced by a search. Others are holding out for further assurances on preventing piracy and guarantees that they will be able to pull their books from the service.

But some publishing executives also noted that Amazon, by far the largest online bookseller, stands to benefit far more than they do. Now, in addition to books, they said, Amazon can sell music, electronics, clothing and other goods to users drawn to the site by the chance to search its digital archive, and the publishers would not receive a cut of that revenue.

How authors will react is another question. Most book contracts allow publishers to give away excerpts for promotional purposes, but authors may contend that Amazon's search service more closely resembles some kind of research system. "This sounds like an anthology right, and that has to be specifically approved by the author, and if a publisher is going to license the electronic rights to the whole work there has be to reasonable compensation for that," said Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild.

Amazon appears to be betting heavily on the idea. At a time when Amazon is squeezing hard to lower its costs everywhere else, the company is paying to enter thousands of texts into its searchable database, the publishers said. Although there are many works already in digital format, others would have to be scanned at a cost of more than $200 a book, executives in the industry said. It is unclear how many books Amazon is paying to scan.

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