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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."
This looks like it is only for non-fiction. Usually not to hard to tell what a non-fiction book is about just by reading the title.
Have you noticed that they now offer web searching as well, and are also generating third-party ads based upon what you're looking for?
This development may bite them back - when I look for something on Amazon now, I often find in their ads that other people have the item cheaper. Amazon may get a nickel or quarter for the referral, but they lose the dollars from the markup.
Get off my launchpad!
True enough, but quality is of question too. Not all Calculus textbooks, for example, are of equal educational value.
:-)]. Now you would be lucky to get a calculus/algebra/science/anything textbook and at best you can only find those "cheat sheet" books which basically tell you how to solve every problem [but not why the solution works].
It would be very valuable to be able to open a chapter of the book and give a read over it, you know, like in a real fucking bookstore.
The problem being that stores [brick and mortar] like Chapters.ca stock only self-help dime-a-dozen whim-of-the-minute books. In fact when the local chapters first open you could walk in and buy TAOCP [I did
For the most part people have to blindly trust some review from "BigGuy4477" about the value of a 89$ textbook...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
doesn't this infringe on basically every copyright that the publishing industry has?
I write code.
.. there was no mention of the actual search technology Amazon would be using to allow searching the text of such a large archive of books (why only non-fiction I wonder).
This type of text searching has been around for a gazillion years and is not really that complex. It really depends on how flexible they want to make the searching. Case in point, wildcards. Google sacrifices flexibility by not allowing you to search on wildcards in their news searches in order to gain speed. Ditto for things like phrase searching, etc. The actual # of docs is pretty much irrelevant wrt search speed (at least directly). It depends more on the features you allow in your query language and the # of hits returned by each part of your query. Plus you're dealing with static data that can easily be distributed.
The tough part of all this is getting the stuff in digital format. I assume for most current books it won't be a problem. The hassle would be older books that you'd actually have to OCR. Though once they're done, they would have a pretty valuable asset.
Looks like they'll be going with a proprietary solution... wouldn't partnering with Google make more sense for them?
You are aware that Google's a proprietary solution, right?
Just because Slashdot loves Google doesn't mean it's all of a sudden non-proprietary!
This sounds like a good project that they could get some gov't funding for.
Besides the obvious copywrite problems, if the gov't was to get involved and Amazon (or whoever) was allowed to permit searching an entire book for concepts / keywords but not be able to view the entire book without paying for it this would both increase sales and usefulness.
If this was the origional model for online music, think of all the problems that would have been avoided. Perhaps a second look at this type of archiving will help the movie industry as bandwidth increases.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
How authors will react is another question.
Isn't this what happens in the RealWorld? You walk into a bookstore, open it up, read a few pages and make a decision on whether or not you want to buy it?
I think publishers and authors would be rather short-sighted to not allow potential customers shop online the same way they shop in brick and mortar stores.
Ryan O'Rourke
Besides, in college you usually don't have a choice about which textbook to use for the class. I guess you could always purchase supplemental books, but those are usually out of the price range/interest level/time scope of many college students.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).