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Amazon Launches Full Text Book Search
m00nun1t writes "Amazon have launched a new service that allows you to search the full text of books. This sounds like an incredibly useful function as well as technically impressive at this scale. I wonder if a patent is in the works." Or if a patent is already owned.
You 'almost', but not quite, hear the book pirates, most probably because they don't formally exist. ebooks are widely available in unencrypted format, and the latest releases, while in secure formats such as Secure MS Reader or Adobe, are probably much easier to crack than creating a bot to collect a book online page by page.
ebooks are a pretty healthy alternative to normal books, but I don't see the publishers worrying too much about piracy. Perhaps it's because the average script kiddie who will spend 2 days downloading Matrix Reloaded from Usenet is just not the type to try and crack open a book, much less crack an ebook.
I tried the search again today and got nearly 5,000 results, with the capability to actually look inside the book and see if the reference is useful to me. Very impressive indeed, patent or no patent.
Peer Pressure
Bash Amazon all you want, but this is a very useful technology.
In five minutes I was able to find three books that talked about findings first listed in two of my own published scientific papers, yet these books did not cite me, or anyone else, as the source of that information. My lawyer is currently preparing three letters.
I also found two other books in which the author used verbatim quotes and original theories from various interviews I have given, yet both authors passed off the statements as their own. My lawyer is now preparing five letters.
Aside from being used to protect my own research rights, I have found the search system useful for finding topics of interest discussed in certain books which are not referenced in any of the descriptions about the books. I just ordered three books I would not otherwise have ever purchased.
While I don't think highly of all of Amazon's practices, I must hand it to them for whatever technical undertaking created this search feature.
You can read the page it is on and +/- two pages.
This is equivalent of the facility you have in a physical bookstore to open a book and browse a few pages before purchasing. I can see it might be very useful, if they get the majority of books in a field accessible like this.
I wanted a PHP book the other day, and it is very difficult to decidew which one of the plethora available I wanted. So I went to my physoical bookstore. Smaller choice, but I could open each and get an impression of whther ther were slow, detail by detail, dummies books or the sort of high-speed summary I wanted.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I don't think there is in the generall case a correct answer to whether collectives should be singular or plural - it depends upon the context.
"Congress have failed to agreee..." because you are talking about a lod of swuablling politicians who are definitely plural.
"Congress has past a bill..." because those politicians have managed to achiueve a consensus and act as as a single entity.
In this case the sungular is correct, because Amnazon as an entity is offering a new service. But you could use the term collectively for all employees of Amazon.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
As I read this rather interesting post, I am trying to figure out why Amazon took this route rather than the many many routes available to them to publicise or provide a richer experience to the average Joe buyer...
/.ers here i.e., the ability to help researchers to find out obscure stuff that wont find its way even into the google scheme of things but that is not a huge majority so I am left wondering.
Even with a full text search facility I doubt very much if it can come close to matching the experience of flipping through a book at the local book store no matter how effective the searching facility.
I can think of one reason and that has already been mentioned by a few
- ramas opines !!
"grep."
I believe there is a body of prior art for scanning in books and greping them. Is that not one of the oft repeated benefits of ebooks?
Whether or not Amazon can get a patent on a shell script to serve up the results . . . on the web oooooooo, remains to be seen I suppose.
They managed to get one on "Give me one of those, put it on my account and drop it by my house" a "technology" my grocer has been offering over the phone for 40 years that I'm personally aware of.
However, since this sort of "technology" is exactly the sort of thing that the web, and the internet itself for that matter, was invented for I'd have to guess there's a lot of prior art. It's certainly obvious and trivial, but that doesn't seem to count for much these days.
The problem with things that are so obvious and trivial that "everyone" has been doing it for decades is that it's hard to demonstrate in court because no one bothers to document it.
Can you prove your grandfather put his pants on one leg at a time?
Common sense tells you he did, but common sense no longer applies in an age that grants patents to perpetual motion machines and peanut butter sandwiches.
KFG
Article in December Wired talks about Amazon's book scanning, how they legally do it, who does it, how many books so far, and protections.
On a Metafilter discussion earlier today someone discovered that it maxes out at about 75 pages. They got this message:
You've reached the page-view limit for this book or you've reached the monthly page-view limit for the Search Inside the Book feature. Feel free to return to the pages you've previously viewed. If you want to see more of this copyrighted material, you can purchase this book. You can also search inside other books. Click here for more information or continue shopping.
So evidently they are keeping track and your quota resets every month. Interesting.
1. After a search, it gives you a list of "Customers who bought this also bought:". For instance, see this.
2. They have the concept of "Listmania" which allows every user to create a list of their own recommended products. If your search aligns with their list, Amazon will suggest that you look at it. Search for something you want and keep an eye open for the listmania section.
Doesn't this meet your criteria for "I'd like to find other thinks I might also be interested in.". And on top of that, I suppose the "browse" option is too complicated?
This new feature of searching the full text only allows you to find related items in a different way. If you have a better idea on how to search their site that they don't provide, send them a suggestion. It is in their best interest to let you find things you want.
Read all about it here: http://www.nettle.com/archives/000062.html
I was stuck when working on a problem set; I Googled for a while and found out that there's a bunch of helpful info in one particular problems and solutions book. Curious about the book, I went on Amazon, and lo and behold, I can actually read the book. So, I look at the table of contents, find the relevant section, and search for the heading of that section. I can now read two pages from it. Not a problem; just pick a phrase on the second page and use it as a search query. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That, of course, would be impractical to do for more than ~4 pages (which was what I needed), but you get the point.
In a couple of hours I joined a few other guys working on the set, and it turned out they had just bought the book. There was a big "Doh!" when I showed them my printouts.
Now, if I actually found the book genuinely useful as a result of this experience, I'd buy a hardcopy. But I for now I think I'll stick with the current method. And I suspect many people might do just that: oftentimes there are references that aren't crucial to have, but convenient to turn to on a few occasions. The book search feature is perfect for those.