Warm User Reception for Amazon Book Search Feature
Amazon.com's new capability to search the texts of books in its catalog, which we previewed in this Weblog several weeks ago, is finding a warm reception from users and librarians alike, according to the San Jose Mercury News and other outlets. This capability opens up a whole world of content for Web-trained consumers of all kinds, who now have the ability to browse true premium content online. The search is as simple as any other Web site interface, and returns the book title, purchasing info and an excerpt showing search text in context. Click on the page reference link, and you get an image of the page with the phrase "Copyrighted Material" embedded in the image. A little awkward, but perfectly acceptable for many browsing needs. Getting the most relevant context for a given phrase is still somewhat a work in progress: Entering the phrase "now is the winter of our discontent" returns a critical analysis of William Shakespeare as the first choice, but the bard's play Richard III that opens with this line was not to be found - perhaps not among the texts provided by the 190 publishers participating in this exercise. It's early days, so no doubt it will take some time to get meaningful correlations between user iterests and titles, but overall it's an encouraging performance. The ability to browse book content online elevates books and book browsing into a new realm of relevance and value, and through Amazon's aggressive promotion of search integration technologies it should make its value known not just to consumers but to institutions as well in short order.