Today's Washington Post Food section article by Renee Schettler, about Amazon.com's new "Search Inside the Book" feature, has the best explanation I've yet read on how this feature works, and why it's alarming more and more people within the book community - publishers, authors, bookstores - as its power becomes apparent. Google quietly announced yesterday, by the way, that it's exploring a joint venture with major publishers. Think it's related to Amazon's new feature? D'oh! From the article:
"Last Wednesday, the only people privy to Ina Garten's recipe for Potato-Fennel Gratin were those who had bought the best-selling "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," in which the recipe was first published. But Thursday, Amazon.com was giving away the recipe for free. The online purveyor of books had launched a new feature, Search Inside the Book, which, in collaboration with publishers, enables customers to conduct a keyword search of more than 120,000 books. Customers may then read several pages of any of these books - including pages featuring recipes - free of charge."
I checked my book, BABY: though you can "Look Inside the Book," you can't Search. Amazon even has a little box next to the book that says, "Why can't I Search Inside the Book?" If you click on it, you're told "the publisher has not agreed to make the contents searchable," or some such. Hey, my publisher, New Horizon Press, bless their souls, who accepted and published my book after all the big-time New York houses declined because the book was too frightening or other such nonsense, has about three employees; that it continues to exist is a miracle. I seriously doubt they have time to deal with requests from Amazon to put their content online; as it is, everyone there is busier than the proverbial one-armed paperhanger.
More from the article: "To acquire Garten's recipe, all any carb-craving Amazon customer has to do is type the words "potato gratin" into the search box on the Web site's home. Search Inside the Book does the rest."
"Here's how Search Inside the Book works: The new feature was integrated into the site's existing search function. After typing in the keyword(s), customers are required to log in; though the search is free, registration with a credit card is required."
"There are two ways to conduct a search. One may search among all the books available or limit the search to the contents of a single book. A search among all the books produces a search-results page listing books relevant to the query and, beneath that, links to those pages of the books that contain all the keywords. Click on the link to view the actual page from the book; you may also proceed two pages forward or backward."
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
i don't think it's gonna dismantle anything.
anybody who will snag, say, a recipe from a book without buying it wouldn't have bought the book in the first place.
2 - Eric Olsen
Joe , thanks for this as it is a hot topic. I don't think it will do any harm, either. The sections available around the search item is limited and will function like a 30-second sampling of a song, which pretty much everyone now agrees helps sales, as opposed to file sharing entire songs, which may or may not help/hurt sales depending of who paid for the study.
I think it's all good! Yeay
3 - Chad Orzel
Of course, if Google is to be believed, there are already in excess of twenty thousand potato gratin recipes on the Web. Maybe that specific one isn't in the list (I don't know, as I don't really care enough to scan all 21,000 entries), but you don't need Amazon's help to do away with most of the need for cookboks.
4 - Michelle
Interesting questions, but would I go through all the hassle of printing 20% of the book as screenshots, wait 30 days and go on with the rest till I have the book complete? It's so much easier to enter a bookstore and buy the damn thing;-)
5 - Eric Olsen
exactly, concerns over this are - as usual - greatly overwrought. I see a net gain for publishers and authors. Give a little, gain a lot.
6 - Corinna Hasofferett
and a net gain for blogcritics and blogers at large, which in turn helps the industry:
at my last post here, thanks to Amazon's new toy I was able to find books relating to an important authority in the Israeli Army and politics history. No book of his seems to have been translated into English, but there was a very long list of books which mentioned him plenty.