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Wednesday
Nov262003

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.

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