Dear Jeff: You very nicely asked me in a letter you began posting last week on your Web site to describe my experience using the new feature Search Inside the Book, which a lot of smart people are saying will put Amazon way ahead of other online book retailers. You encouraged me and others to poke among some 33 million pages of text of some 120,000 books, trying searches based on every word (your italics) in them, not just by author, title or keyword, as before. You even offered me a Segway Human Transporter if I had the best tale.
Jeff, I’m not the stupidest person on the information superhighway, although I often have been confused for him. I try to keep up with Internet developments and know that Amazon, Yahoo and Google are trying to outdo each other by coming up with sharper search tools, the better to lure shoppers. I’ve comparison shopped on Google’s Froogle, so let me try rifling through your files.
I typed: I am born.
Jeff, you gave me 73,952 hits on this, all with brief excerpts, and it took me until No. 112 of your “featured selections” before I got to “David Copperfield.” You know, Dickens classic, Chapter 1, “I am born.” I had to wade through such things as “The Political History of Tudor and Stuart England: A Sourcebook” (“I am a Gentleman born to some Fortune …”), “The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics” (“`Quantum mechanics is very impressive,’ he wrote in a letter to Max Born. `… but I am convinced that God does not play dice.'”) and “I’ll Never Have Sex With You Again: Tales from the Delivery Room” (“I, obviously, am born to breed and I’m proud of it.”).
I tried putting the quotation in quotation marks and did much better: There were 185 hits and Mrs. Copperfield’s little boy was No. 20.
Another of my favorite opening lines is “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The search yielded two hits, both referring to James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” a classic of hardboiled fiction, but not the book itself. You sell “Postman,” but apparently it isn’t yet among the 120,000 available for wide text searches. Too bad.
I found Search Inside the Book more useful in finding reference information contained in works. On a lark, I typed, “Chicago Cubs and triple play.” That yielded 3,050 hits, but high up was a book by the redoubtable Roger Angell. After supplying you with credit card and billing information, you let me read a few pages of it — which I could print but not download or copy — and I was informed the team had pulled off an unassisted triple play against Pittsburgh in 1927. Neat. (By the way, thanks for not charging me.)
You gave me 53 hits when I tried “White Sox and Schaller’s Pump.” But for the life of me, I couldn’t find any reference to that venerable Bridgeport neighborhood watering hole in “Pharmacotherapy: A Pathophysiologic Approach.” Lucky for me ’cause the book costs $155.
You also saved me from having to shell out $31.50 (your price, list price $45) to buy James Peterson’s “Glorious French Food.” When I get a hankering — and who doesn’t? — for salade verte au confit de canard et aux champignons sauvages, I can just print his recipe for wild mushroom and duck confit salade from your Web page. Merci beaucoup.
Jeff, I’ve read that some people in the publishing industry are worried that book sales may suffer because you’re letting me browse and print pages from a lot of books for free. Last week, the Authors Guild recommended that some writers try to block their works from being included in Search Inside the Book. Hey, next thing you know musicians and record companies will be complaining about people downloading music for free.
Oh, yeah, about that Segway. . . .
