Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Plan Would Allow Text Search Of Books
emmastory writes "The New York Times is running a story (free registration required) about a new development at Amazon - they plan to assemble "a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction." Users would only be able to read a certain portion of the text from any one book, but it sounds promising nonetheless. The Times article suggests that this is part of a larger strategy to compete with Google and Yahoo by making Amazon an authoritative source of information on everything book-related."
Would this be like OReilly's Safari online books on steroids? Safari is my favorite bookstore for a while now.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
It is well established that you can cite portions of a work (which seems to be what they're doing), if the portions are especially large, I would imagine that they'd have to get permission from the publishers.
Of course, as Amazon, they're probably in a position to do so.
The NIH has a good start with something of this nature. The NCBI (part of the National Library of Medicine) has a fully-searchable set of about 20 books. The books are generally cover biology topics, but represent some of the standard texts used in college courses. They call the project Bookshelf and it is entirely free. Several books contain direct links to gene sequences, etc.
I'm surprised nobodys mentioned Project Gutenberg - I mean, they've been OCRing public doman books for a long time now, and there are thousands of texts available... not in some crappy interface that Amazon will use, but in wonderful, sweet, ascii text format. Couple this with some good regular expressions and you're in business... want to see how many times Sherlock Holmes talked about using cocaine? It's elementary!
Actually, most of the crappy writeups on Amazon are provided by the publisher, not Amazon at all. You're only looking at Amazon-originated content in the 'editorial reviews' section of a book page if it says 'Amazon.com' at the top. If it says 'From the Publisher', or 'Book Description', it's the publisher that provided it. This does, it must be said, stretch the definition of 'editorial reviews' somwehat.
Oh, and the books Amazon promotes on its front page, or on section header pages, under headings like 'what we're reading this month' - Amazon doesn't put them there off its own bat - it's done in co-operation with publishers, with publishers buying placements with virtual money called 'co-operative marketing funds', which are allocated on the basis of how much money the publishers' books made for the ookstore the previous year. Same deal with physical bookstores of course - spend co-op money, and you can get your books 'face out' on the shelf (cover showing, rather than spine), or onto an 'end-cap' (a display shelf at the end of a row), or even onto a table display.
A short time working in publishing is a great way to disabuse yourself of the notion that book stores know or care anything about the books they sell...
> Are Amazon obtaining each and every rights owners' permission to perform this duplication? I doubt it
Why do you doubt it? You do realise that Amazon has a direct business relationship with every publisher whose books it sells already, don't you? They don't buy their books from Barnes & Noble...
Amazon's book buyers will offer this facility to publishers (whose salespeople they already work with directly - many publishers will employ one person whose entire job is selling books to Amazon) as a marketing benefit - and charge them for the privilege, no doubt - just as they do today with their 'look inside' feature. In order to keep competitive, publishers will prepare and supply the text in the format Amazon wants. It's really not hard for Amazon to do this at all.