Great news for authors and publishers out of Amazon HQ today. The Search Inside the Book program is (finally) going all digital. Previously, only some publishers could submit their books digitally and the rest had to mail a physical copy in which was not only costly but slow as heck.

At the same time as opening it up to digital across the boards, they are also getting rid of physical book submission entirely.

If you want to take advantage of Search Inside the Book (or just have no idea what it is) you can read my tutorial on it here.

Here is the message from Amazon in full:

Dear Search Inside the Book Contributor

Thank you for your continued support of Search Inside the Book! Two out of every three books sold on Amazon.com are now enrolled in the program and we continue to make great strides to expand the sampling selection, improve the customer experience and drive more sales for your books. We observe that books in the program outsell books not in the program and that conversion rate increases as customers sample more pages. Earlier this year we launched a new preview Reader that loads 50% faster and offers customers an enriched set of sampling features.

As a reminder, starting September 30th, 2009, we will only accept PDFs for new book submissions.

We are doing this because we remain committed to reducing the amount of time it takes to receive, process and prepare a book for preview onsite. One of the key ways we do this is by asking publishers and authors to submit books via PDF format. In addition to being more eco-friendly, PDFs can also be processed 3x as fast helping to ensure your titles are “SITB enabled” by their publication date when demand is at its peak. All of this enables you to sell more books! If you have not already done so already, please visit www.amazon.com/sitb-submissions for instructions on submitting PDF files and guidelines.

Best Regards,
The Search Inside the Book team Amazon.com

Best Regards? None of those medium quality regards for us, no sir!