Some people don’t like Amazon’s ‘Search Inside’

The Seattle Times has a report that trade book authors (many of whom do pretty well out of Amazon) don’t like the new Search Inside facility because it might enable users to get the key piece of information they are seeking without having to buy the book. “The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead.

The new feature may have other problems: Each search allows the user to see the full-text of the page where the keyword appears, plus two pages forward and two backward. But savvy searchers can actually read more of the book.

In an e-mail to its members, The Authors Guild, the country’s oldest and largest society of published authors, said it was able to print out 108 consecutive pages from a best-selling book by using key search terms.

An attempt to use the method yesterday successfully called up more than 150 pages of a travel book.”

Yeah! And I can also dig my garden with a teaspoon.

Update:According to Wired, “Amazon.com’s new book-searching feature does not allow users to print pages from within books, soothing authors who feared the tool could give users too much free content at the expense of book sales.”

Microsoft trying to buy Google?

Yep. The NYT is reporting that “According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft – desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business – approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.”

There will be a lot more of this as Google moves towards a stock market flotation. The obvious thing to do is for Google to auction its shares to Internet users rather than going down the usual corrupt route of letting merchant banks corner huge blocks of shares — enabling their clients to make easy killings and control of the company to pass to Redmond in due course.

Lovely piece in today’s Economist about Google. Nice cartoon too.

Image (c) The Economist 2003, naturally.

Why does an audio CD hold 74 minutes’-worth of music?

Must be some technical reason for it, surely? Not at all says the NYT:

“In the early 1980’s, Sony was helping to develop a new digital music technology. Mr. Ohga, then the company’s president, insisted that no matter what else, the new format had to be able to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony without interruption. Mr. Ohga, you see, had been a classical vocalist before getting into electronics.”

A lovely trick — from Tim O’Reilly

From a Wired report. Quote:

O’Reilly said the old idea of stand-alone software — the unconnected word processor or spreadsheet — is becoming passé. Even the idea of making a distinction between software platforms — Mac, Windows and Linux — is starting to no longer make sense.

“The platform is no longer the box sitting at your desk,” O’Reilly said.

To illustrate his point, O’Reilly asked how many people in the audience of Mac OS X programmers were Linux users. Several raised their hands. But when O’Reilly asked how many used Google, there was a unanimous show of hands.

“Ah,” O’Reilly said, “you’re all Linux users.” Google is a Linux application running on the world’s largest Linux cluster, he explained.

What a wonderful rhetorical trick. Must use it sometime soon in a lecture.

Well, whaddya know — the US Army is switching to Linux

According to The Register, ‘the US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen Linux for a key component of its “Land Warrior” programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander’s Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable. According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards Linux by the US Army: “Evidence shows that Linux is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to Linux-based OS.”‘

Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and…

…and, er, red wine*

[Both pictures taken last Sunday at Nicci and Sean’s place in Suffolk.]

*But not, alas, from my own vineyard, as an eagle-eyed reader pointed out! Sigh! One cannot get away with anything on the Web.

Google sells out

Google is going public with a stock market flotation. It’s the beginning of the end for what was a great company and a terrific service. Or so says Vic Keegan.

Amazon’s Really Big Idea

A searchable archive of all its books — where you can search the text. And there’s a prototype already working. See this report. Quote:

“Amazon’s new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it’s still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.

The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I’ve recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York’s most famous pillager of public money. Manber types “Boss Tweed” into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.

From the Hamill reference, I link to a page in the afterword on which he cites books that influenced his portrait of Tweed. There, on the screen, is the cream of the research performed by a great metropolitan writer and editor. Some of the books Hamill recommends are out of print, but all are available either new or used on Amazon.

With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map.”

Update: lovely piece by Steven Johnson on the implications of this.

RFID tags go to school

If you think John Ashcroft and David Blunkett are bad, just wait until Radio Frequency Identification tags go mainstream. RFIDs are the next-generation bar code. A tag is a low-cost microchip outfitted with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which contains the tagged item’s description. Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially scanning themselves.

Wired is running an interesting story about a school in Buffalo which has already deployed the technology as a pupil-monitoring system. “Principal Stillman”, it reports, “has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse’s office. Eventually he’d like to expand the system to track students’ punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses. ‘That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22,’ Stillman said. ‘All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids…. Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us.'”

And of course we can put RFID tags on banknotes just to make sure that nobody’s laundering money. And..well, the sky’s the limit.

This stuff is going to happen — and MUCH sooner than people think. Industry, commerce and government think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and are already tooling up for it. In the UK, Tesco put RFID tags on Gillette Mach3 razor blades (apparently because they are a regularly shoplifted item.) RFID technology will enable a nightmarish world of fine-grain, total surveillance. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?

Jonathan Zittrain on reforming copyright law

“It’s time for us to wise up and redraw copyright’s boundaries so that the law and reasonable public expectations fall into better alignment with one another. To be sure, this may require more, rather than less, subtlety.”

Lovely, thoughtful, sensible piece. [Full text.]