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.

Comments

Re:abuse

[Enoch Root]

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.

Wow!

[plasticmillion]

I'm impressed. A couple of days I want onto Amazon to find books about Singular Value Decompositions (a mathematical technique that can be used for efficient statistical analysis of large groups of documents, among other things). I wasn't particularly surprised when it returned 0 results, since anyone who puts the term "Singular Value Decomposition" in their book's title obviously doesn't know much about marketing. Of course I don't actually give a damn if the term is in the title or not; I just want to know if the books talks about this technique.

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.

Various worthwhile uses

[emcron]

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 see whole pages

[AlecC]

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.

Wired article: "The Great Library of Amazonia"

[Enigmia Man]

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.