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

abuse

[technix4beos]

I can almost hear the screams of joy from the underground book pirates.

How easy can this service be abused, with automatic webbots doing the searching?

I can imagine there might be filters, time limits, and max searchs/day limits for something of this scale, no?

Re:abuse

[Maskirovka]

How easy can this service be abused, with automatic webbots doing the searching?
You can only browse two pages in either direction per search. You also have to be logged in. I suppose someone could script a system to create thousands of account, then use an army of zombie machines to OCR the pages from a variety of different IPs. That is assuming that Amazon has EVERY page of every book available to the service, which I doubt.

It would probably by easier to coble together a robot built around a laptop with an ocr equiped camera and book manipulation software and set it loose in a big library at night. For 50 years.

No Searching Inside O'Reilly Books

[theodp]

Even though he said he was 'blown away' by Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature, Tim O'Reilly has decided not to participate in the program for now. 'If they end up being a Google for published content...we need to think better about what publishers get out of it,' he said.

Re:No Searching Inside O'Reilly Books

[Zeddicus_Z]

As a Safari subscriber, I'd say it's probably because Full Text Search of online book content is also present at O'Reilly's own Safari online tech book site. You've been able to do the same thing Amazon is now crowing about, on every book Safari has, since launch quite some time ago (year or two perhaps?)

Safari is more of a "service" (i.e. renting access to book content) than a "feature" of a retail website, which is all Amazon's "innovation" seems to be.

Basically the only real different between the two (aside from what is cited above) is that Amazon just lets you know the content is mentioned, and shows you a page or two. Safari gives you the entire book. That and that Amazon has a much wider range of books in non-tech genres

Here's a quote relevant to the parent post

[Anonymous Coward]

There's books about everything:

Encyclopedia of New Media : An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology -- Steve Jones (Editor); Hardcover

Excerpt from page 0: ". . . post-ranking system used by members the of Web message board Slashdot.org, began as a result of community self- restraint in the face of unrelenting trolls (pointlessly hostile posters). In addition, some cyberspace forums now require . . ."

See more references to slashdot troll in this book.

Re:Amazon...

[will_die]

It is really nice, I was using amazon right as they switched it one.
I was searching for books on Object Role Modeling(ORM), I had first done a search for ORM and did not find anything of interest. They then switched it on while I did a search of 'Object Role Modeling', this poped up a few books with the text where it was being used.

Why do I need to enter a credit card number?

[waimate]

From the FAQ:
Why do I need to enter a credit card number?

We require credit card information for security purposes only. We will not charge your credit card account any fees for using the Search Inside the Book feature.

Uhuh. Security. Whose?

Yeah, I want to be financially secure too !

Re:Yeah, but..

[KDan]

Some web sites have 100's of A4 pages, but google still returns in a jiffy. I'm pretty sure their book collection is well indexed, if they're offering this service. Probably with the google engine, too.

Daniel

Scanner problems

[thrill12]

Neat idea, but some excerpts come out all wrong:
See this for example...
Mass-OCR'ing has it's drawbacks..

Re:Worthwhile uses: Finding defendants?

[emcron]

Umm, maybe you missed the point. It allows me to find others who are stealing from *me*

When you pass off somone else's ideas as those of your own it's called plagiarism.

I'm not suing them for any monetary damages. Just a requirement that my own work be attributed to me.

Re:ebooks vs CD/DVD

[Enoch Root]

The music itself is free, but quality recordings on MP3s are still being sold only as CDs, and are NOT available online for free. Thus, if I want to find quality classical music, I need to find a good recording, and that implies either piracy or buying a CD.

Whereas if I want H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, I am one click away from a quality MS Reader version of it.

Biased?

[nimrod_me]

Since this feature is not available for all books (and, in fact, wasn't available for any book in my wishlist) the results are necessarily very biased.

Thus, your searches will tend to return more results from books that are fully indexed.

Now that I think about it - this is a major incentive for publishers to get their books indexed.

How do we know _which_ books...

[dpbsmith]

...are included in the search?

A check on "the clocks were striking thirteen" yields seventeen hits, including the Cliff's Notes to Nineteen Eighty-Four and a reference in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations...

but none to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four itself.

We must conclude that the coverage is spotty.

Has it occurred to you...

[nniillss]

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.

...that not everybody reads your papers? You should definitely contact the authors first. They might have had the same ideas by themselves.

Re:Indexing mechanism

[real bio]

Yes, but searching pages scanned/OCR'ed and highlighting the keywords has been a feature of Google search for a long time:

Google Catalogs (Beta)

It's very probable that they licensed the Catalog Search technology from Google.

Re:Wow!

[real bio]

Google has a prior art for this, and maybe they have the patent too:

Google Catalogs

Free Books?

[Angram]

If you can read 5 pages of text per search, couldn't you just continually search for a phrase on the 5th page, allowing you to read any book for free with a decent amount of effort?