the other day in one of my classes, the teacher was lecturing using power point and an MS Word version of our textbook. I could not help thinking "dang, I wish I had the MS Word version of that book" because it would make finding things (ctrl f) very easy, which got me thinking about better ways to find what you want in textbooks.

there is no way a teacher would give that .doc version of the text book out to students, even if they had purchased the text legitimately, because people would pirate it.

so I thought of a solution to this problem and would like to know what you guys think.

what if you made a computer program that searched a .doc or scanned version of a textbook and reported back only the page numbers of incidences of words. so if I search, say, "normal distribution" it will tell you what pages contain that word. moreover, you could have it search for bold print only (more likely to be definitions/headers).

it would be like an index, but better because you can search things that you remember reading but aren't in the index, and you can search much faster if you are near a computer. I have to do a lot of lab reports and such, so I do much of my homework either on the computer or near it, and a program like this would simplify things quite well for me.

You can find several textbooks in pdf format (usually) on various file-sharing venues.
I've got tons.

Anyway. As to the search idea. If it was pdf, you could make a catalog for it.

If it was a pdf, you don't get past the sgaring/copyright issues.
It could easily be done in a hard-coded compiled portable database.
It would allow for a wide range of cross reference searches, english language searches, related subject matter returns... The possibilities are endless.
You could come up with a portable device (akin to a Franklin/Covey device) to plug a flash card into.

I think it's a great idea.

You should do it before someone else does.

well, the problem with getting them from file sharing is, well, the legality. I am looking for a way to have the convenience of a .doc/pdf/txt and yet be legal. for example, if I were to search an illegal .doc of my textbook at school, you could be narced on, or accidentally not notice a teacher walking by. if you are caught doing something like that, it could be very bad for your career (both in school and out)

Do you just want to do it for yourself, and not as a business venture?
Regardless of whether it is a text file, a doc, a pdf, a jet database, whatever it is, will violate the same laws if you want full text search capabilities.
If not, then you just need the indicies and Table of Contents in a doc and search that, which is pretty limited.