Amazon.com Text Search

TIP OF THE DAY

Amazon.com Text Search


In Amazon's Text-Search, a Field Day for Book Browsers

By LISA GUERNSEY
New York Times
Published: November 6, 2003

DAVID SMITH, a product manager in Seattle, knows of the hubbub surrounding Amazon.com's new feature, Search Inside the Book. The service, introduced two weeks ago, allows people to do keyword searches within the text of books before buying them. Predictions about the future of books have been swirling in the air ever since.

Will people stop buying books, since they are now able to view and print the pages they want without paying for them? Will they buy more books, because they will be better able to find what they need? What will happen to that time-honored tradition of standing for hours in the library or bookstore, thumbing through page after page?

Interesting questions, Mr. Smith agreed. But something else prompted him to Search Inside the Book. He had spent futile hours trying to recall the title or author of a pulp novel that he had read more than 10 years ago. All he could remember, he said, was that it was an action adventure set in Antarctica. He had tried Google. He had browsed catalogs of titles and authors. He had nearly given up.

"But today," he wrote in an entry on his blog (www.nonfamous.com) two weeks ago, "I searched for 'antarctica seal marines invisibility' (yes, the book did touch on all these plot points!) and found 'Ice Station' as the sixth search result. Brilliant!"

He clicked to his Amazon "wish list," filled it with other books by the same author (an Australian writer named Matthew J. Reilly) and told his friends to go there before Christmas.

The impact of Amazon's new service may well mean profound changes for the book industry. Or it may lead to nothing more than a blip in buying behavior. But for now, if you are a book lover or researcher, you may, like Mr. Smith, be having a field day just trying out the service.

Type in your name and watch it appear in an obscure footnote. Hunt down a familiar quotation and read it in context. Resurrect books whose title and author long ago escaped the memory. Or try to figure out why Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, is so interested in the rockets called resistojets, the example he gave in introducing the service. (Maybe it has something to do with another Bezos venture, a space research company; Amazon will not say.)

So far, the full-text search applies to 120,000 books from 190 publishers. The numbers are small, given that large research libraries, say, often house more than a million volumes, and the list excludes some of the most popular books, like the "Harry Potter" series published by Scholastic. But Steve Kessel, Amazon's vice president for media products, said the number of books was comparable to what is available in most bookstores.

Some users are impressed. "It's a lot better than using a search like Google," Mr. Smith, who works for a data software company called Insightful, said in a telephone interview. "It's just limited to books, which makes it useful." Books, often mourned for their absence in today's type-and-find research, may have their day in the sun again.

Troy Johnson, a reference law librarian at Creighton University in Omaha, plans to use the feature to impress his patrons. He wants to see the look on their faces when he points them to the exact pages that answer their questions. "Should look good when I tell someone, 'On Page 45 of book xyz they talk about your subject,' " Mr. Johnson wrote last week in an online forum. "Librarians should think of how they can exploit this tool."

But while such a vision may lead people back to books, it does not necessarily mean they will buy them - especially if they are in a library a few blocks away.

Mr. Smith's wish list, for example, may make him a good customer in the long run, but he is also using the tool in a way that may be less palatable to publishers: he discovered a "Dilbert" book that had been scanned in as part of Amazon's new service. Now he fills a few minutes of free time each week flipping through the pages online, reading cartoons without paying for them.

In an interview, Mr. Johnson predicted that such practices would cause some book publishers to pull out of the Search Inside feature. Intellectual property that can fit on one or two pages, like poetry, recipes, tips from travel books, and encyclopedia entries, may tempt people to read them from home without paying.

Mr. Kessel of Amazon said that no publishers had pulled out of the program and that 37 new ones had expressed interest. But Amazon said that 15 authors had asked to have their books extracted from the service. In one case, reported by The Seattle Times, Avalon Travel Publishing contacted its 140 writers to explain the program and offer to remove the books of those declining to take part. Bill Newlin, the publisher, said in an interview that 10 authors had asked that their books be withdrawn and several dozen had explicitly asked to remain in the program.

Until last week, users could print pages too, but Amazon shut off that feature so that a printout will now show a blank space where the book's text had been. (Of course, people are already talking about how savvy users with screen-grab software may get around that restriction.) Amazon has also said that it will limit any reader to viewing 20 percent of a book's pages in a given month, although it is not clear how the company would prevent people from logging in under multiple names or from different computers; Amazon declined to discuss security measures. "If a student just needs six to eight pages of a law book," Mr. Johnson of Creighton said, "I could see a student doing a screen capture and printing from that."

But Amazon does not appear to be too worried about it. It says that sales of books with Search Inside features have grown faster than sales of its other books.

Some have speculated that the search tool will become useful in niche applications but no more than a novelty to people in search of a novel that matches their mood and is intended to be read as a whole.

Steven J. Gordon, founder of AllReaders .com, expects that people looking for, say, a mystery set in a romantic place will continue to go elsewhere. (He hopes his own Web site might be one of those places. AllReaders offers a free search service built on a database of details like characters, plot and setting; it includes references to more than a million books and movies.)

"When you liked a book recently, was it because it had a certain word in it used over and over?" Mr. Gordon said. "No. You liked it because of certain traits or themes or characters."

But there is something tantalizing about keywords, too, especially when they can be merrily appropriated to play the citation game.

That's the latest fetish of Timothy Noah, a columnist at the online magazine Slate. Mr. Noah delights in calling Search Inside the Book the greatest time-waster since the dawn of the Guinness Book of World Records. Twice last week he used the service to see how many times the names of famous people were cited in Amazon's subset of books. "Deities score especially high," he wrote. "The somewhat generic word 'God' gets 94,190 hits, while 'Jesus Christ' scores 23,016 and 'Buddha' yields 11,074."

As it happens, several services similar to Amazon's already exist. Patrons of libraries that subscribe to services like Ebrary and netLibrary have offered free online access to tens of thousands of scanned books for a year or more. And users of those services can usually view and print as much of the book as they want. With the time to waste, they could even have embarked on the same deity hunt.

Zimmerman's Legal Research Guide

TIP OF THE DAY

Zimmerman's Legal Research Guide

http://www.lexisone.com/zimmermanguide/index.html
An excellent searchable and browsable web legal encyclopedia. Useful for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

Turkeys

TIP OF THE DAY

TURKEYS

"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
A. Whitney Brown

Thanksgiving Site of the Day

Martha Stewart may be a little distracted with all of these federal criminal charges going on, but that won't stop her from showing you how to properly carve a turkey.

Speaking of turkeys.........

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/24/opinion/24MART.html?pagewanted=all&position=

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

About a Turkey

By PATRICK MARTINS

Published: November 24, 2003

When you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, waiting for the main attraction to be brought in on a platter, take a moment to think about where it came from and how it found its way to your table. After all, your turkey is not the same wily, energetic, tasty bird that struck our ancestors as the perfect centerpiece for an American holiday.

Most Americans know that the turkey is a native game bird, and that Benjamin Franklin thought it would have been a better national symbol than the bald eagle. For good reason: in the wild, Meleagris gallopavo is a fast runner and a notoriously difficult prize for hunters. Even after they were domesticated, turkeys remained spirited, traditionally spending the bulk of their lives outdoors, exploring, climbing trees, socializing and, of course, breeding.

Now consider the bird that will soon be on your plate. It probably hatched in an incubator on a huge farm, most likely in the Midwest or the South. Its life went downhill from there. A few days after hatching ? in the first of many unnatural if not necessarily painful indignities ? it had its upper beak and toenails snipped off. A turkey is normally a very discriminating eater (left to its own devices, it will search out the exact food it wants to eat). In order to fatten it up quickly, farmers clip the beak, transforming it into a kind of shovel. With its altered beak, it can no longer pick and choose what it will eat. Instead, it will do nothing but gorge on the highly fortified corn-based mash that it is offered, even though that is far removed from the varied diet of insects, grass and seeds turkeys prefer. And the toenails? They're removed so that they won't do harm later on: in the crowded conditions of industrial production, mature turkeys are prone to picking at the feathers of their neighbors ? and even cannibalizing them.

After their beaks are clipped, mass- produced turkeys spend the first three weeks of their lives confined with hundreds of other birds in what is known as a brooder, a heated room where they are kept warm, dry and safe from disease and predators. The next rite of passage comes in the fourth week, when turkeys reach puberty and grow feathers. For centuries, it was at this point that a domesticated turkey would move outdoors for the rest of its life.

But with the arrival of factory turkey farming in the 1960's, all that changed. Factory-farm turkeys don't even see the outdoors. Instead, as many as 10,000 turkeys that hatched at the same time are herded from brooders into a giant barn. These barns generally are windowless, but are illuminated by bright lights 24 hours a day, keeping the turkeys awake and eating.

These turkey are destined to spend their lives not on grass but on wood shavings, laid down to absorb the overwhelming amount of waste that the flock produces. Still, the ammonia fumes rising from the floor are enough to burn the eyes, even at those operations where the top level of the shavings is occasionally scraped away during the flock's time in the barn.

Not only do these turkeys have no room to move around in the barn, they don't have any way to indulge their instinct to roost (clutching onto something with their claws when they sleep). Instead, the turkeys are forced to rest in an unnatural position ? analogous to what sleeping sitting up is for humans.

Not only are the turkeys in the barn all the same age, they ? and the roughly 270 million turkeys raised on factory farms each year ? are all the same variety, the appropriately named Broad Breasted White. Every bit of natural instinct and intelligence has been bred out of these turkeys, so much so that they are famously stupid (to the point where farmers joke they'll drown themselves by looking up at the rain). Broad Breasted Whites have been developed for a single trait at the expense of all others: producing disproportionately large amounts of white meat in as little time as possible.

Industrial turkeys pay a high price for the desire of producers and consumers for lots of white breast meat. By their eighth week, these turkeys are severely overweight. Their breasts are so large that they are unable to walk or even have sex. (All industrial turkeys today are the product of artificial insemination.)

Needless to say, no Broad Breasted White could hope to survive in nature. These turkeys' immune systems are weak from the start, and to prevent even the mildest pathogen from killing them, farmers add large amounts of antibiotics to their feed. The antibiotics also help the turkeys grow faster and prevent ailments like diabetes, respiratory problems, heart disease and joint pains that result from an unvaried diet and lack of exercise. Because the health of these turkeys is so delicate, the few humans who come in contact with them generally wear masks for fear of infecting them.

On non-industrial farms, it takes turkeys 24 weeks to arrive at slaughter weight, about 15 pounds for a hen and 24 pounds for a tom. Industrial turkeys, however, need half that time. By 12 to 14 weeks, the whole flock is ready for the slaughterhouse. Once slaughtered, the turkeys have to suffer one more indignity before arriving in your grocer's meat case. Because of their monotonous diet, their flesh is so bland that processors inject them with saline solution and vegetable oils, improving "mouthfeel" while at the same time increasing shelf life and adding weight.

Anyone who cooks knows that salt alone won't do the trick. Once, simply sticking a turkey in the oven for a few hours was enough. Today, chefs have to go to heroic lengths to try to counteract the turkey's cracker-like dryness and lack of flavor. Cooks must brine, marinate, deep fry, and hide the taste with maple syrup, herbs, spices, butter and olive oil. It's no surprise that side dishes have moved to the center of the Thanksgiving menu.

Even so, 45 million turkeys will be sold this Thanksgiving, so turkey producers aren't doing badly for themselves. But could they be sowing the seeds of their own misfortune? By relying solely on a single strain of the Broad Breasted White, and producing it in huge vertically integrated companies that control every aspect of production, entire flocks and even the species itself is one novel pathogen away from being wiped off the American dinner table. The future of the turkey as we know it rests on only one genetic strain. And the fewer genetic strains of an animal that exist, the less chance that the genes necessary to resist a lethal pathogen are present.

It's for this reason that maintaining genetic diversity within any species is crucial to a secure and sustainable food supply. Sadly for the turkey and for us, the rise of the Broad Breasted White means that dozens of other turkey varieties, including the Bourbon Red, Narragansett and Jersey Buff, have been pushed to the brink of extinction because there is no longer a market for them.

What to do? One solution is to bypass Broad Breasted Whites altogether. A few nonprofit groups ? including my own, Slow Food U.S.A., and the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy ? are working with independent family farms to ensure that a handful of older, pre-industrial turkey varieties, known as heritage breeds, are still being grown. These varieties are slowly gaining recognition for their dark, rich and succulent meat. (My group, which encourages the preservation of artisanal foods, sells turkeys on behalf of these farmers, but we don't profit from the transactions.)

While it might be too late to get your hands on a heritage bird this year, there are some other options available to consumers who would like a turkey raised in a more humane fashion, even if it is a Broad Breasted White. Farmers' markets often have meat purveyors who raise their turkeys the way they should be, free ranging and outdoors.

At the market, you can often meet the person who grew your turkey and ask about how it was raised. Many independent butcher shops have developed relationships with local farmers who deliver fresh turkeys, especially for special occasions like Thanksgiving. A few environmentally conscious supermarkets get their turkeys from small family farms.

But as you shop, you need to look for more than just labels like "organic," "free range" and "naturally raised." They have been co-opted by big business and are no guarantee of a healthier and more humanely raised bird.

The key word to keep in mind is "traceability." If the person behind the counter where you buy your turkey can name the farm or farmer who raised it, you are taking a step in the right direction. You'll help give turkeys a better life. You'll be kinder to the environment. And you might even wind up with a turkey that tastes, well, like a turkey.

Patrick Martins is director of Slow Food U.S.A.

NationMaster

TIP OF THE DAY

NationMaster

http://www.nationmaster.com/

Where Stats Come Alive!

"astounding and easy to use"
- New York Times

Welcome to NationMaster.com, a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. You can generate maps and graphs with ease on all kinds of statistics. What's more, you can select exactly which countries you want to include.

We currently have 646 stats, and this number is increasing all the time.

Changing the Subject Line on an Email

TIP OF THE DAY

Changing the Subject Line on an Email

By editing the subject lines of messages you receive, you can organize your mail according to your own scheme. Very handy. The only thing to keep in
mind is if you reply to the sender after editing the subject line they may get confused.

If you get faxes or voicemail sent to you automatically via email, you can change the subject to something that makes sense to you.

[Eudora]

Simply open the message (by double clicking on it) and edit the contents of the subject box.

[Outlook]

Open the message, edit the subject line, close the message and, when prompted, save the changes. The trick with this is the subject line doesn't look editable because it's on a grey background, but it works nevertheless.

Turn on in-cell editing and you can change the subject line without having to open the email and re-save it at all. This works best if you have the Preview Pane turned on:

        [Outlook 2000/XP]

        From the View Menu select Current View -> Customize Current View -> View Summary -> Other Settings -> Rows, enable the Allow In-cell Editing option, and click OK.

        [Outlook 2003]

        From the View Menu select Arrange By -> View -> Customize Current View -> Other Settings and enable Allow In-cell Editing.