Posted on: Sunday, November 23, 2003

Amazon tool opens access to books' pages

By Byron Acohido
USA Today

SEATTLE — Amazon.com has quietly unveiled a new search tool that lets online shoppers peek at excerpts buried deep inside a large vault of books for sale.

Amazon already enables searches by author or title. And it has long let customers view the opening pages of some books. Its newest service, called "Search Inside the Book," allows access to hundreds of book pages where a queried topic or subject is mentioned.

By giving consumers glimpses inside books they might not have otherwise known about, Amazon and 160 partner publishers hope to sell a lot more books online.

"The more information a consumer has about a book ... the more likely they are to click through and buy it," says Adam Rothberg, spokesman for Simon & Schuster.

The new service will include 120,000 tomes. More will be added, particularly if it proves to be a hit with consumers.

Amazon appears to be making a move to front run the race to deliver more relevant search results, says Tim Hickernell, Meta Group technology analyst.

Search giants Google, Yahoo, Microsoft MSN and AOL are all trying to find ways to more quickly ascertain a consumer's specific interests, then match that interest to related online advertising.

Amazon could use its new service not just to sell more books, but also to connect advertisers to consumers likely to be interested in buying a specific product or service. "That's a direction they're well suited to go in," Hickernell says.

It took a bold stroke for Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, to make the new service available. First, it had to scan 33 million book pages into an image archive, in some cases manually tearing pages from bindings to run through a scanner, in others, shipping caches of books to scanning centers in India and the Philippines.

Udi Manber, Amazon's vice president of search algorithms, then converted the images into text data that could be cross-referenced and accessed by a custom-built search engine.

Amazon solved copyrights scattered among thousands of authors and media companies by taking the position that it is supplying pictures, not text, on a restricted basis.

Users cannot view more than a few pages adjacent to a given excerpt. The pages are actually graphical images of pages, and there is no way to download, copy or create a link to any page.

The service lacks the ability to "personalize" search results — that is, determine whether a consumer who types "peaches" wants information on children's books, fruit trees or something else, notes Meta Group's Hickernell.

But such programming is quickly getting refined by Google, Yahoo and others. If Amazon keeps step, it could pioneer personalized searches not just for book excerpts, but for lyrics in songs or dialogue in movies, as well.

For now, Amazon remains coy about its long-range plans.

"We can't discuss what the next steps would be," says Manber. "But I would certainly agree this is only a first step, and this could be a lot more powerful."