Search Inside the Book

If you are a bookworm here’s an absolute must site to visit. Amazon now offers “Search Inside the Book”. Well known online Internet book site Amazon, is now offering the ability to search the entire contents of 120,000 books, or if you like the big numbers, 33 million pages.

With this powerful new search feature, people can discover books that may never have surfaced in previous search results. Search Inside the Book, allows you to also browse sample pages and do additional searches inside a particular book to confirm that the title is just what you’re looking for.

"Search Inside the Book" allows the searching of the full-text of more than 33 million pages from over 120,000 printed books. More than 190 publishers are participating in the program, including Wiley, Time Warner Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Inc., Random House, Inc., and many others. Access to the full-text of 120,000 titles has enormous research and reference value.

How does it work, what’s a good way to get started?

Firstly, remember you are searching about 33 million pages. So, if you don't want to drive yourself crazy, don’t start your search with a general search word like "tree”. Instead, start your search with a word phrase or a combination of words that you think will find interesting books, or at least those which aren't addressed in book topics.

The service is actually really easy to use. Simply enter your search terms, words, groups of words or phrases into any Amazon search box. In addition to the usual results that list authors and titles, you'll also get to see short snippets labelled "excerpt from" and the hyperlinked title of the book where your search terms were found.

If you click on the title link you'll see a scanned image of the page with your search term highlighted on the page. Amazon is using a technology called optical character recognition technology to find words found in the scanned images.

Scanned books are fully browseable. You can move forward or backwards one page at a time using links above the page image. You can also move forward by simply clicking on the page image.

It's also possible to find a title and then search within it. Just look for the "search inside this book" label above the cover image of books in your search results.

Unfortunately, Table of Contents and Index pages do not contain hyperlinks. This would have been enormously useful -- perhaps we can hope to see this capability in the future.

Is Amazon the only company offering this type of service?

Certainly Amazon is the first commercial bookseller to offer this kind of service, however many libraries offer access to thousands of web accessible books via netLibrary. This service offers full-text searching and many other options.

Ebrary is yet another company operating in this space. The National Academy Press continues to offer free web accessible full-text access to over 2500 titles.
Another very good site is the Online Books Page. This "page" is actually a database of more than 20,000 freely accessible online books.

Will the pages in the physical book look exactly like the pages I see online?

Because the book was scanned to create the on-line version, pretty much what you see is exactly what the book should look like. As a rule of thumb however printed pages are usually of a much higher resolution and quality.

Occasionally in some cases, pages or parts of pages may be omitted because of special requests from the publisher, or because of copyright restrictions.

Can anyone simply logon and use this service?

You will need to sign in or register as an Amazon.com customer to view pages. Amazon suggests this is for the protection of the copyrighted material of publishers and authors who have agreed to participate in this service.

If you are already a recognised, registered customer, you should not have to sign in to view pages. If you are not, Amazon requires that you sign in or set up an account with them before you can view pages. Here’s the rub to this service, if you do not have an Amazon account you will be asked to provide a credit card number. Amazon assures their visitors they won't be charged, however this aspect seems a little strange to me.

Will all books be available for search?

The Search Inside the Book feature includes only books that have the publisher's permission to display copyrighted material. If the book you want is not available, Amazon states that they are planning to significantly expand their Search Inside the Book in the future.

How can I find out more about how this service works?

Search Inside the Book is a significant extension of Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. It allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you are looking for. It's a bit like browsing a huge bookstore – only with millions of searchable pages available to you.

A good place to start learning is to visit the How It Works page on the Amazon site. Amazon also provides a helpful overview of the service, showing how it works in step-by-step fashion. A more detailed FAQ is also available online.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au