Amazon Offers Thinking Inside the Book

Wow! That almost looks like a legit headline! Online book seller Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com ) is now offering the ability to search the entire contents of 120,000 books -- or 33 million pages. Cripes.

Okay, let's get started.

Wander to Amazon. Do a search. REMEMBER that you are SEARCHING 33 MILLION PAGES. Okay? So don't start your search with a general search word like "tree." You will drive yourself nuts. Start your search with a word or combination of words that you think will find interesting books, or which aren't addressed in book topics.

I'm interested in the possible relationship of spina bifida to Aspergers Syndrome, which isn't the topic of any book that I know. So I search for "Spina Bifida" "Aspergers Syndrome" (a quick test appears to indicate that Amazon's search isn't case-sensitive) and I get 67 results. There are no books that address this combination of search words, but there are several books that mention both words.

Search results include the regular Amazon results (name of the book, average rating, cost, how soon it ships, etc.) and below that, an excerpt from the book covering your keywords, the page number it's on, and a link to see more references to your keywords in the book. (You will always see this link even if there's only one reference to your keywords; don't assume that that link means you're going to get more references.)

To see the entire page, click on the page number hyperlink. You will have to have an Amazon account to do this. If you have an Amazon account but have never provided a credit card number (for example, if you're a member of their affiliate program) you will be asked to provide a credit card number. Though you're assured you won't be charged, this feels weird to me. Once you've clicked on that link (and you're logged in) you'll see a graphic of the page. You can go forward two pages and go back two pages from your search results or zoom in (the quality of the pages was such that I never needed to zoom in.)

This search isn't perfect. One of my results was for "The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Revised and Updated for the 21st Century)" -- apparently John Mellencamp was born with spina bifida. But there's no mention of Aspergers Syndome on this page, and when I clicked on "See more references to "Spina Bifida""Aspergers Syndrome" in this book" I got zero results. But this is a huge new resource and, if you already have an Amazon account, an absolute must-see.

Posted to Humanities-Literature-Amazon