Amazon Plan Would Allow Text Search Of Books 193
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."
Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonder how long before .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like they'll be going with a proprietary solution. Even though the article seems to indicate that Amazon is launching this new service as a response to Google's "Froogle" shopping search product, wouldn't partnering with Google make more sense for them?
Re:Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Very cool. I've purchased books based on the ability to look inside the book.
Of course this *could* be great for college paper researchers, looking for a quote or two to stick in a research paper. Depends on how much meat you can really get at.
If it weren't for copyright issues, I'd love to see libraries do something this. You already have the equivalent for magazine articles, but usually you have to either pay or actually go to the library to use their InfoTrac or whatever engine.
this could be huge... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the writeups, it's the moderation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, you get situations where teachers apparently tell their classes to submit reviews on Amazon for a book, and you have 30 reviews that say nothing.
And, of course, being a bookseller, there is a strong motivation for them to bias things so that positive reviews outweigh negative ones.
Jon Acheson
Re:Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm far more likely to pay attention to the customer reviews than a write up from Amazon.
I guess what I'm saying here is that if you buy a book from Amazon then please take a few minutes to write a quick review saying what you liked/hated about the book, it will help other people make a decision. I've found that Amazon are usually quite fair (well Amazon UK are) and will publish a negative review so long as it's clear and non-offensive. If you write "This book sux." it'll get dumped, something like "This book skips a lot of the detail you need for this sort of level." then it will probably get through.
Even if I buy a book from somewhere else I'll usually write a review of it on Amazon.
Stephen
Fair Use? (Score:2, Interesting)
Caching the entire contents of books sounds a little beyond fair use. The concept is cool, but they're going to need some publishers behind them. Maybe they think the name 'Amazon' will keep lawsuits away, but it won't.
How long before? (Score:1, Interesting)
Alrwight. Now imagine a DVD burner. Ok. Now imagine 100,000 books inside a DVD. Not long before you will be able to have *all* the books ever written in a couple of DVDs (or whatever the next generation of optical disks at 100GB will be (from sony)). And what about DRM? Shouldn't books have DRM?
Seriously though, the problem is that you need a clerk to sit down and manually scan all those books.
Re:Patent this (Score:5, Interesting)
That's different: that's just blatant disregard for prior art. It's quite a another matter if you announce something in a huge press release and _then_ tried to patent it. You'd look like a moron because you yourself created the prior art! Not that this would stop Amazon...
Re:Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Except in a 'real fucking bookstore' I can look through the table of contents to see if it has chapters that may sound interesting, and I can then read a little bit from a section of MY CHOOSING. I don't care what amazon wants me to see from a book, and yes I realize some is better than none, but the real beauty of a bookstore is to flip around the entire book with no restrictions and see if you like the whole thing.
Re:Change the world... (Score:3, Interesting)
How about linking searches for self-help books to a book on addiction to self-help books?
Better yet, link to a book about non-violent ways of dealing with a society that's been fucked up by the manipulations of rich assholes.
Re:Fair Use? (Score:3, Interesting)
contrast this with Amazon.com being one of the largest distributors in the world of books for all these publishers - it's the publisher's friend. Sure, they may do some things that threaten publishers (like their print on demand publishing) but Amazon didn't go out and try to co-opt all their business by providing unfettered access to any book a "client" could provide an ISBN number for.
This sounds like a fantastic service. If they were to provide a "fair use excerpt" from any book on any subject in response to a query, that would be one service that finally lives up to the promise of the internet. What remains to be seen is if it actually lives up to that promise, or if it becomes yet another "premium" subscription service that simply "embraces and extends" the widening information gap between those with money and credit - and those without.
Re:It's not the writeups, it's the moderation. (Score:3, Interesting)
one book i read by some guy that was just awful only had 1 glowing review (by his girlfriend/wife/fuckpuppet). so i reviewed it badly 3 months ago. i'm still waiting for that review to arrive.
*sigh*
Re:Wonder how long before .... (Score:3, Interesting)
Mainly teasers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:speaking of searching with Amazon (Score:2, Interesting)