23 Oct 2003 | Brad Hurley said...

How on earth did they do that? I can't imagine they scanned and OCR'd every page of all those books, and obtaining electronic copies of every book from every publisher would be difficult if not impossible. Or is this just a subset of books in print that are readily available in electronic form from the publishers?

23 Oct 2003 | Matthew Oliphant said...

Books participating in our Search Inside the Book feature...

My guess is the publishers gave over electronic copies. We do book reviews for the Mag ( plug :) I work on, and it's pretty easy to get a PDF of the book, which has text search capabilities.

Just a guess of course. Not to put him on the spot, but perhaps we could get the " inside guy" Kokogiak to comment? :)

23 Oct 2003 | alan taylor said...

I'm not really the inside guy on this particular project, but I do know that there's a mix of OCR and publisher-provided electronic copies going on (do a few searches, and you should be able to recognize some typical OCR-ish typos). Isn't this just cool as Hell though? My favorite use to date: looking up Historical Figures. If you were researching someone like Thomas Edison for instance, you can use this to find not only books that are about Edison, but many books that just mention him - and from the number of hits, you can guess the relevance as well.

23 Oct 2003 | ~bc said...

Wow, that's quite an undertaking! Impressed.

23 Oct 2003 | dayvin said...

Amazon won't accept electronic copies of books from publishers, according to their Publishers' FAQ.

How do I submit books electronically?
Currently, we only accept physical copies of approved Search Inside the Book titles.

23 Oct 2003 | Scorched said...

yada yada, it's cool to be able to search the text of the books, but I think that they have the worst organized search results of most any website! i stay so annoyed with it that I don't purchase from amazon.

true, i'm still bitter over what they did to CDnow, but even their book results are overly complicated and unclear. 37Signals should make it their next project!

23 Oct 2003 | Mike said...

I'm looking forward to 37better.com, where everyday the table-fighting heroes combine their powers to redesign one website until the whole web is better!

And oh ya, that Amazon feature is cool too :)

23 Oct 2003 | Tim said...

I guess it is a pretty neat feature...one thing I've noticed is that on certain searches (for "skis" for instance), the book listings come first...and the excerpts that include the word "ski" or "skis" take up quite a bit of vertical space, pushing a lot more content down "below the fold."

I guess that's a good thing if you're a retailer, like Amazon, that has a done of left- and right-gutter elements that you'd like potential customers to see...scrolling IS a good thing.

Also, the "Sponsored Links" (blech) force a lot of content down on the page.

In the end, Amazon's search results seem to be quite bloated.

23 Oct 2003 | One of several Steves said...

Very cool feature. Makes it much easier to search for books about a particular subject.

JF, I've occasionally been running into the same thing regarding ship dates too. I suppose one of us should actually complain one of these days.

24 Oct 2003 | Tom said...

Interesting article on wired about this.

26 Oct 2003 | Martin said...

Amazing - this has happened to me in the last week.

I ordered an ADSL modem/router using the 1 day delivery option (at extra cost) five days ago - and they still haven't shipped it.

When it arrives, I'll be calling for a refund of my delivery charge.

27 Oct 2003 | Krispy said...

When it arrives, I'll be calling for a refund of my delivery charge.

Calling Amazon? Good luck.

28 Oct 2003 | Martin said...

You must be thinking of Amazon.com - Amazon.co.uk have an excellent phone-in service.

I ordered Memento on DVD and they sent me a second-hand copy - all scratched. I called the customer service number and they immediately sent me out a new one, no quibbles - and all I had to do was put the dodgy one back in the box and send it back.

Recently, I ordered a modem and changed my mind about it - I sent it back, and they refunded my money within 14 days.

No luck needed mate - just move to the UK.

29 Oct 2003 | nerdy mc writes a lot said...

Had the same thing happen, but with a funny twist.

Ordered a new phone (sony ericsson t616... pretty fone, crap interface). ships within 24 hours.

36 hours go by. no "shipped" status.

48 hours: "sorry we're having trouble with your item. it's currently on backorder and we will let you know when we get it so we can ship it out."

write to amazon.com: please cancel it, i can get it elsewhere without the hassle and the wait.

response without a few hours: sorry, you can't cancel the item since the order has already gone to the warehouse and we can't rescind it. you can always return it at your own expense!

72 hours: phone shows up on my loading dock (!)

192 hours: congratulations! your item has shipped!

wtf!?

-j