Interesting new thing from Amazon...
Danny Sichel
"search by word within the book".
"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
does that do to copyright?
This may cut down on the number of YASIDs, or it may not.
There's also a certain degree of peculiarity - Bignum != all, I guess.
For instance,
"search for 'uterine replicator' returns one hit - KOMARR "
"search for 'Paarfi' returns two hits: THE PHOENIX GUARDS and FIVE
HUNDRED YEARS AFTER"
"search for 'Morganti' returns one hundred eight hits"
Evelyn C. Leeper
The search is only for those pages submitted to amazon.com as sample
pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
(We discovered Mark's reviews had been cited in at least two books we
didn't even know about!)
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when
we're not the biggest power on the block. --Bill Clinton
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
> Danny Sichel wrote:
>
> > ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now offering
> > "search by word within the book".
> >
> > "show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> > does that do to copyright?
> >
> > This may cut down on the number of YASIDs, or it may not.
>
> pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
>
> (We discovered Mark's reviews had been cited in at least two books we
> didn't even know about!)
Actually, no, Amazon.com OCRed the entire books for their own use,
after having the publisher send them dedicated sample to-be-scanned
copies.
--
Eloise Mason (nee Beltz-Decker)
elo...@fishdragon.com - website: http://www.fishdragon.com/
"Then there are the great copyediting mistakes of the Bible,
the best of which IMHO was dropping the story of Lilith from
Genesis, but then forgetting to cut the subsequent reference
(Isaiah 34:14)." -- Kevin Andrew Murphy, 10/21/03.
Evelyn C. Leeper
> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Evelyn C. Leeper wrote:
>
>>Danny Sichel wrote:
>>
>>
>>>... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now offering
>>>"search by word within the book".
>>>
>>>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
>>>does that do to copyright?
>>>
>>>This may cut down on the number of YASIDs, or it may not.
>>
>>The search is only for those pages submitted to amazon.com as sample
>>pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
>>
>>(We discovered Mark's reviews had been cited in at least two books we
>>didn't even know about!)
>
>
> Actually, no, Amazon.com OCRed the entire books for their own use,
> after having the publisher send them dedicated sample to-be-scanned
> copies.
>
Well, there are strings in new books that it's not finding.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
>does that do to copyright?
That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
this.
Jon Meltzer
"Evelyn C. Leeper" <ele...@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:fz9nb.13283$ox.13...@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net...
> The search is only for those pages submitted to amazon.com as sample
> pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
Uh, no. See Kathryn Cramer's weblog ...
Terry Austin
news:bnjgi1$mkg$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
books.
--
Terry Austin
tau...@hyperbooks.com
I love children. They taste like chicken.
http://www.cafeshops.com/hyperbooks
David T. Bilek
>Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote in
>news:bnjgi1$mkg$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
>
>> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
>>>does that do to copyright?
>>
>> That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
>> Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
>> clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
>> this.
>>
>The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
>books.
For fiction, yes. Not necessarily so for non-fiction and reference
works.
-David
Terry Austin
news:qfmqpv8e7nt9u7jhv...@4ax.com:
I will grant that the case can be made. I'm not entirely convinced,
however, that people who would copy stuff out of Amazon's search results
would buy the book otherwise. Most likely, they'd go to the library, I
suspect.
And how many authors of "non-fiction and references works" are members of
the Author's Guild? (Serious question. For all I know, most are.)
steve miller
<taustin...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
>books.
There's another sad thing, actually...
now, instead of getting a clear six or ten related hits, people have
to go through 4568 hits -- many of them unrelated. Soem auhtors with a
single work will see their work go from findable on the first search
to being number 3457 on the search list -- so they'll be rather much
hard to find and buy.
Steve
Visiting Conduit and TriNoc*Con in 2004
Balance of Trade out now from embiid.com
Scout's Progress -Prism Award Winner- from Ace
Joe Pfeiffer
How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
Use?
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair
Dreamer
"Joe Pfeiffer" <pfei...@cs.nmsu.edu> wrote in message
news:1bllr6c...@cs.nmsu.edu...
> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
> > On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> > >does that do to copyright?
> >
> > That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
> > Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
> > clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
> > this.
>
> How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
> Use?
There is no hard and fast rule. It depends on the length of the book, the
relative portion quoted, the necessity of the use, etc, etc. Of course, it
also depends mightily on the laws of your jurisdiction, which is always true
and even more so on a worldwide newsgroup. In the US, copyright infringement
is a question of fact as well as of law, which means that there is no
"bright line" test.
Those in the US might be interested to see the US Copyright Office's website
at http://www.copyright.gov/ . Regarding Fair Use, see
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html .
D
Terry Austin
news:qeoqpvs4rekfk51hi...@4ax.com:
> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:57:18 -0000, Terry Austin
> <taustin...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>
>
>>The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
>>books.
>
> There's another sad thing, actually...
> now, instead of getting a clear six or ten related hits, people have
> to go through 4568 hits -- many of them unrelated. Soem auhtors with a
> single work will see their work go from findable on the first search
> to being number 3457 on the search list -- so they'll be rather much
> hard to find and buy.
>
While I will point out that this is an implementation problem (not exactly
a surprise, coming from Amazon), and has nothing to do with the issues the
Author's Guild brings up, yes, that is sad, and stupid. There is apparently
no way to turn it off.
So much for Amazon being of any use whatsoever.
John Schilling
Does Amazon understand that an unrestricted ability to ask "Which books
contains string X?", reduces the question "what is the full text of book
Y?" to an O(N) problem and an only moderately difficult hack?
More to the point, have they implemented appropriate countermeasures?
The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
W. Citoan
> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
> > That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
> > Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's
> > not clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to
> > do this.
>
> How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
> Use?
That question is probably irrelevant to this issue. AIUI, Amazon is not
basing this on fair use, but on permission from the publishers. The
issue is whether the publishers or the authors are the ones that get to
make that decision.
- W. Citoan
--
World War Three can be averted by adherence to a strictly enforced dress code!
Andrew Wheeler
>
> Danny Sichel wrote:
>
> > ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now
> > offering "search by word within the book".
> >
> > "show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> > does that do to copyright?
Absolutely nothing. Amazon has permission from the copyright holders.
<snip>
> The search is only for those pages submitted to amazon.com as sample
> pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
Not exactly; Amazon scanned a massive number of pages. (Some in the US
with bulk scanners, and some overseas with cheap labor.) However, from
what I've heard, they only scanned books from publishers that had not
complained when they announced that they were planning to do this.
Some books seem to have been scanned in totality, and some -- especially
books with discrete non-fictional content, like cookbooks and travel
guides -- only in parts.
(There also was an interesting SFnal fact in one of the reports I read
-- the OCR software ran using downtime on just one of their server
farms. They have so much computer capacity that a massive project like
this essentially ran in the background.)
Reportedly, there also are restrictions to the search, so you can only
move forward a page or so from the point you find by searching. (So,
presumably, if you have more time than sense, you can keep searching for
phrases at the end of the section you've just read and work through an
entire book in one- or two-page clumps.)
I haven't tried it myself yet, since I haven't yet figured out what use
it would be to me. (Though I'm sure I'll think of something; I already
use Amazon a lot for reference.)
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
There are two groups of people: those who divide people into two groups
and those who don't.
-Robert Benchley
Andrew Wheeler
A lot of publishers are ambivalent about it as well -- several major
non-fiction houses (I was just trying to look them up, but Publishers
Lunch doesn't seem to have a web archive) are not participating at all
at the moment. And some of those who are participating are making "we're
just trying this for now" public statements.
Though the publishers seem to all be worried about this project's effect
on the sales of *non-fiction* (especially reference), and not expecting
anything much to happen to fiction.
Andrew Wheeler
I thought Lonely Planet has had success (well, *were having* success,
pre-9/11) with putting full-text versions of their books on their site
-- which would be at least anecdotal evidence that this kind of thing
can help non-fiction as well.
phil hunt
>Does Amazon understand that an unrestricted ability to ask "Which books
>contains string X?", reduces the question "what is the full text of book
>Y?" to an O(N) problem and an only moderately difficult hack?
I wonder how someone might implement this hack? Presumably a list of
popular words, such as the 500th to 1000th most common words in
English, would be useful.
>More to the point, have they implemented appropriate countermeasures?
I would imagine they have. One possibility would be to limit the
number of pages servable to any one user. This would not stop
multiple users collaborating to grab the text of a book, or a
distributed automated grab script.
>The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
>unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
>the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
My understanding is the pages are returned as images, which isn't a
particularly useful format for those who wish to make unauthorised
copies.
--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: <zen2...@zen.co.ku>, but first subtract 275 and reverse
the last two letters).
phil hunt
>On 27 Oct 2003 11:12:12 -0700, Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>
>> > That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
>> > Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's
>> > not clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to
>> > do this.
>>
>> How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
>> Use?
>
>That question is probably irrelevant to this issue. AIUI, Amazon is not
>basing this on fair use, but on permission from the publishers. The
>issue is whether the publishers or the authors are the ones that get to
>make that decision.
Presumably whoever is the copyright holder gets to choose.
Bradford Holden
>
> Reportedly, there also are restrictions to the search, so you can only
> move forward a page or so from the point you find by searching. (So,
> presumably, if you have more time than sense, you can keep searching for
> phrases at the end of the section you've just read and work through an
> entire book in one- or two-page clumps.)
As an experiment, I tried a couple of non-fiction books I have laying
about (on my couch, no less). One, where permission from the
publisher was not denied, I found that I could only search +/- 2 pages
around the identifying search string. The string had four hits, so
you could get all of 15 pages out of a 308 page book along with five
pages of the index.
I found the same thing on the reference provided on Kathryn Cramer's
web log.
--
Bradford Holden
"I'm the critical authority figure in this story; concentrate all your
laser fire at me, please." -- http://www.lileks.com/
David Dyer-Bennet
> "Evelyn C. Leeper" wrote:
> >
> > Danny Sichel wrote:
> >
> > > ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now
> > > offering "search by word within the book".
> > >
> > > "show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> > > does that do to copyright?
>
> Absolutely nothing. Amazon has permission from the copyright holders.
>
> <snip>
>
> > The search is only for those pages submitted to amazon.com as sample
> > pages, so I don't think there's a major copyright issue.
>
> Not exactly; Amazon scanned a massive number of pages. (Some in the US
> with bulk scanners, and some overseas with cheap labor.) However, from
> what I've heard, they only scanned books from publishers that had not
> complained when they announced that they were planning to do this.
Note that the publishers are not, in general, the copyright holders;
hence this explanation isn't entirely consistent with what you say a
couple paragraphs above.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, <dd...@dd-b.net>, <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/>
RKBA: <noguns-nomoney.com> <www.dd-b.net/carry/>
Photos: <dd-b.lighthunters.net> Snapshots: <www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/>
Dragaera/Steven Brust: <dragaera.info/>
David Dyer-Bennet
> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
> >On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com>
> >wrote:
>
> >>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> >>does that do to copyright?
>
> >That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
> >Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
> >clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
> >this.
>
> Does Amazon understand that an unrestricted ability to ask "Which books
> contains string X?", reduces the question "what is the full text of book
> Y?" to an O(N) problem and an only moderately difficult hack?
>
> More to the point, have they implemented appropriate countermeasures?
I haven't been able to play with their search -- first of all it's
*extremely* well hidden (they replaced their entire homepage with a
letter announcing it, but didn't give a link to use it!!!!). And then
I got into some sort of infinite loop on "authorizing" me (I've been a
regular Amazon user for years, so they're doing something special for
people using this new service).
However, we thought about this issue a lot for the book text search on
dragaera.info. We don't support a real phrase search, and give fairly
small excerpts. This makes it quite a lot harder to get meaningful
successive chunks of text.
Also, it only took me a couple of hours each to manually scan and OCR
Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla; to my mind this indicates some sort of
upper limit on how much trouble it's *worth* to protect the contents.
> The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
> unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
> the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
Gutenberg is quite careful to limit itself to the public domain, so
the politics and effects are very different.
steve miller
>My understanding is the pages are returned as images, which isn't a
>particularly useful format for those who wish to make unauthorised
>copies.
Most OCR readers are quite happy to work from an image...
it's only a minor technical problem, I expect.
r.r...@thevine.net
<che...@starswarmnews.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 16:57:18 -0000, Terry Austin
><taustin...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>
>
>>The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
>>books.
>
>There's another sad thing, actually...
>now, instead of getting a clear six or ten related hits, people have
>to go through 4568 hits -- many of them unrelated. Soem auhtors with a
>single work will see their work go from findable on the first search
>to being number 3457 on the search list -- so they'll be rather much
>hard to find and buy.
>
>Steve
>
Here's a brief experiment I did:
Searching on "hani" brought up 1100 results. A lot because of
language, I believe, but too many to go through.
Searching on "hani kif" brings up 38 results. Unfortunately, none are
SF. There's several movie guides, some plays, and several
middle-eastern oriented books. Apparently hani and kif are used in
Arabic.
Looking for Chanur brings it down to 27 books. That's the 5 Cherryh
books (plus a few variant publications), some programming books
(charnur apparently is a common variable name... character number, I'd
guess), and every single book that ever mentions Ms. Cherryh as the
"author of such books as Chanur's..." , and all the books that list
Chanur in her published books, and some books that look like the OCR
was totally on the fritz.
I think that the idea would be more useful if the cover blurbs and
lists of books published hadn't been included in the scanned material.
And, at least in this case, it wasn't at all useful for finding a book
where you didn't remember the title but could remember the species
names.
Rebecca
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
>"Evelyn C. Leeper" wrote:
>>
>> Danny Sichel wrote:
>>
>> > ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now
>> > offering "search by word within the book".
>> >
>> > "show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
>> > does that do to copyright?
>
>Absolutely nothing. Amazon has permission from the copyright holders.
No, actually, they don't. They have permission from the publishers,
and in some cases those publishers did _not_ own electronic rights,
especially on anthologies.
And there appear to have been a few cases where they didn't have
permission from the publisher, either.
>Reportedly, there also are restrictions to the search, so you can only
>move forward a page or so from the point you find by searching.
You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per account.
It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read the next 25%.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
hunt) wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 01:17:34 -0000, W. Citoan <wci...@NOSPAM-yahoo.com> wrote:
>>On 27 Oct 2003 11:12:12 -0700, Joe Pfeiffer wrote:
>>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>>
>>> > That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
>>> > Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's
>>> > not clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to
>>> > do this.
>>>
>>> How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
>>> Use?
>>
>>That question is probably irrelevant to this issue. AIUI, Amazon is not
>>basing this on fair use, but on permission from the publishers. The
>>issue is whether the publishers or the authors are the ones that get to
>>make that decision.
>
>Presumably whoever is the copyright holder gets to choose.
No, it's whoever holds the electronic rights. For all recent Tor
books, for example, that's Tor, even though they aren't the copyright
holder.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>schi...@spock.usc.edu (John Schilling) writes:
>
>> The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
>> unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
>> the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
>
>Gutenberg is quite careful to limit itself to the public domain, so
>the politics and effects are very different.
No, Gutenberg limits itself to the public domain _and_ works where
they were given permission by the copyright holder (e.g., J.F. Bone's
_The Lani People_).
Mark Atwood
>
> Most OCR readers are quite happy to work from an image...
> it's only a minor technical problem, I expect.
However, most good modern OCR software *really* wants a 1200dpi
greyscale to start from. Amazon doesn't give that.
(Personally, I think that a good "countermeasure" would be to add a
blur to the page image on all parts of the page more than a couple of
inchs away from the matching text.)
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right,
m...@pobox.com | people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
J.B. Moreno
> Balance of Trade out now from embiid.com
Which I immediately checked out and was quite sucked in, reading chapter
after chapter with eagerness, until I'd read 23 and was looking for 24
-- which wasn't available. No reason for panic I reassured myself, you
can simply purchase it, you'd intended to anyway. But the only computer
I have ready access to is a Mac, and so I find myself left out in the
cold.
Is my only hope to wait the 4 months for the release from Meisha Merlin?
Or is there some chance embiid will be selling a html version?
--
JBM
"Everything is futile." -- Marvin of Borg
Jim Cambias
> "David T. Bilek" wrote:
> >
> > Terry Austin <taustin...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
> > >Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote in
> > >news:bnjgi1$mkg$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
> > >
> > >> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com>
> > >> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
> > >>>does that do to copyright?
> > >>
> > >> That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
> > >> Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
> > >> clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
> > >> this.
> > >>
> > >The sad thing is, the only likely effect is to increase sales of their
> > >books.
> >
> > For fiction, yes. Not necessarily so for non-fiction and reference
> > works.
>
> I thought Lonely Planet has had success (well, *were having* success,
> pre-9/11) with putting full-text versions of their books on their site
> -- which would be at least anecdotal evidence that this kind of thing
> can help non-fiction as well.
What happened to Lonely Planet after 9/11?
Cambias
Matt Ruff
>
> How big a piece of a book can you reproduce and still be within Fair
> Use?
As big a piece as the judge presiding over the copyright infringement
lawsuit says you can.
-- M. Ruff
Matt Ruff
>
> ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now offering
> "search by word within the book".
They're not just offering it, they're making it the default search
option. I know a lot of people are het up over the copyright
implications, but the real issue for me is that it makes searches less
useful.
The other day I was looking for a novel by the author Matt Mcintosh. I
got 769 hits. Hit #1 was the 2002 Sports Encyclopedia, which contains
statistical entries for players Matt Howard and Tim Mcintosh. Hit #2 was
a political non-fiction book that mentions House Reps. Matt Salmon and
David Mcintosh. Hit #3 was "Screen World 2000," which includes a movie
cast list with actors Matt Lucas and Neve Mcintosh...
Meanwhile, Matt Mcintosh's pen name turns out to be Matthew Mcintosh, so
he wasn't even on the list -- or at least, I don't think he was. I
didn't actually go through all 769 entries. By the way, the title of his
new novel is "Well." Any guesses on how many matches that turned up?
I should mention that this is only a problem on the default search. If
you go to "Advanced Search," you can specify that you're only looking
for author's names or title keywords. And assuming you've got the
author's full name spelled correctly, even the default search will tend
to list books by that author first -- but if you sort the list, such
books lose their priority and go into the general pile.
Seems to me that once again the Author's Guild is barking up the wrong
tree. I worry a lot more about people not being able to find a book at
all than about them reading it for free once they do...
-- M. Ruff
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
>I haven't been able to play with their search -- first of all it's
>*extremely* well hidden (they replaced their entire homepage with a
>letter announcing it, but didn't give a link to use it!!!!). And then
>I got into some sort of infinite loop on "authorizing" me (I've been a
>regular Amazon user for years, so they're doing something special for
>people using this new service).
It's not an optional thing (which seems strange to me). If you search
for anything on the site, it's going to look at titles, authors, AND
within the books. I'd rather have the option of searching within
books or not.
Rebecca
Matt Ruff
>
> Andrew Wheeler wrote:
>
>> Reportedly, there also are restrictions to the search, so you can only
>> move forward a page or so from the point you find by searching.
>
> You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per account.
> It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read the next 25%.
It's probably even easier to just take the damn book out of the library,
or find a comfy chair at Barnes & Noble and read it there.
-- M. Ruff
Peter Meilinger
>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>> You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per account.
>> It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read the next 25%.
>It's probably even easier to just take the damn book out of the library,
>or find a comfy chair at Barnes & Noble and read it there.
Only if your library or local bookstore have it, of course. And
I'd much prefer to read a book in the comfort of my own home than
somewhere else, even if it's on a computer screen. I can't see
myself taking advantage of this particular opportunity, though.
Pete
Ron Henry
news:3F9E9208...@worldnet.att.net...
> I worry a lot more about people not being able to find a book at
> all than about them reading it for free once they do...
Classic ad / con game of "baffle them with bullshit and take advantage
of -- redirect -- their desire to buy while they're confused," seems
like.
Ron Henry
Michael S. Schiffer
news:bnm4re$f4p$1...@news3.bu.edu:
> Matt Ruff <storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>>> You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per
>>> account. It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read
>>> the next 25%.
>>It's probably even easier to just take the damn book out of the
>>library, or find a comfy chair at Barnes & Noble and read it
>>there.
> Only if your library or local bookstore have it, of course.
Or if the library will buy it on request (my local library's never
turned down any of my purchase requests, except where they could
borrow the book instead) or can get it by inter-library loan (which
should be possible for most if not all books in Amazon's catalog,
albeit with a possible delay in the case of bestsellers). If you
want to read a book but not own it, it's not generally that hard to
do that for free (except for rare books that Amazon isn't all that
likely to offer) regardless of what Amazon does here.
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
wth...@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu
>
>
> Seems to me that once again the Author's Guild is barking up the wrong
> tree. I worry a lot more about people not being able to find a book at
> all than about them reading it for free once they do...
>
Agreed. I submitted a large amazon order last week.
It would have been larger, but finding things had
suddenly become more difficult. I eventually tried
advanced search and things went faster, but by that
time it was 9 PM and I hadn't eaten, so ...
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>>
>> You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per account.
>> It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read the next 25%.
>
>It's probably even easier to just take the damn book out of the library,
>or find a comfy chair at Barnes & Noble and read it there.
That assumes you have a library or B&N somewhere nearby, and consider
the hassle of plugging in credit card numbers greater than the hassle
of getting the car out of the garage and driving to the library or
bookstore -- or taking the subway, or walking, or whatever may apply
in your particular situation.
Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
for free.
I'm not saying this is the end of the world, but I do think Amazon's
actions are presumptuous and not necessarily legal.
phil hunt
>Danny Sichel wrote:
> >
>> ... they've scanned the contents of (BIGNUM) books, and are now offering
>> "search by word within the book".
>
>They're not just offering it, they're making it the default search
>option. I know a lot of people are het up over the copyright
>implications,
I don't think there are any major ones. If people want free info on
a particular subject, they can and will use Google to find web pages
on it. People are unlikely to use this Amazon service for that,
since they'll only be getting one page, and if they want to view the
next page, there will be no convenient way for them to do so.
>but the real issue for me is that it makes searches less
>useful.
They should have used a separate search box for it.
lal_truckee
>
> I'm not saying this is the end of the world, but I do think Amazon's
> actions are presumptuous and not necessarily legal.
It looks like Amazon has disabled the view page options, at least for my
login...
Hallvard B Furuseth
> Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
> for free.
You mean, if your employer is paying paper and ink? :-)
Otherwise I suspect it will be more expensive than buying the book.
--
Hallvard
Lawrence Watt-Evans
hunt) wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 15:57:43 GMT, Matt Ruff <storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>> >
>>They're not just offering it, they're making it the default search
>>option. I know a lot of people are het up over the copyright
>>implications,
>
>I don't think there are any major ones. If people want free info on
>a particular subject, they can and will use Google to find web pages
>on it. People are unlikely to use this Amazon service for that,
>since they'll only be getting one page, and if they want to view the
>next page, there will be no convenient way for them to do so.
On the contrary -- you can go two pages in either direction from your
initial hit.
Eric Walker
wrote:
[...]
> . . . . I submitted a large amazon order last week.
> It would have been larger, but finding things had
> suddenly become more difficult. I eventually tried
> advanced search and things went faster, but by that
> time it was 9 PM and I hadn't eaten, so ...
May I, with some diffidence, suggest that one might look at the
special Amazon search pages I created for my site? ("Pages"
because there is one for each of the six national Amazon
divisions.) Their URLs are:
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=US
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=GB
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=CA
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=DE
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=FR
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/callsearch.php?nation=JP
Those pages use "Amazon Web Services", an XML interface to
Amazon's database, to find results, and they do it somewhat
differently than do Amazon's own "advanced search" pages (in
truth, the CA and FR search pages do not use AWS because Amazon
has not yet introduced it for those divisions, but they too
work differently--and, I think, better--than Amazon's own
pages).
(The DE, FR, and JP pages search those divisions for books *in
English*; each of those divisions has an entire special section
of such books--including sf.)
If you go to one of those pages, you will find a long text
passage about searching Amazon in general and about how to use
the page's search box in particular, but that's a "read-once"
block; there is, right at the page top, a "jump to box" link
that you can use in future to bypass that text.
Some of the differences between those pages and Amazon's own
"advanced search":
. they find _all_ editions--no need to click on a nearly
hidden "More" link to see the lot;
. they default to locating only books actually buyable--no
"THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE" hits (but that
behavior can be one-click switched off); and,
. they default to finding only "real books"--no coloring
books or jigsaw puzzles, though also no ebooks or CDs (but
that behavior too can be one-clicked off).
(In the interest of full disclosure, I am--of course--an Amazon
affiliate, and will earn some puny commission if you buy
anything you search out from my pages, *but* that does not
affect your price: that, and all else, is just as if you bought
direct through Amazon's own pages.)
Incidentally, any feedback or comments on the experience will
be helpful.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://greatsfandf.com
David Cowie
>
> Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
> for free.
>
How much are you paying for ink and paper?
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Peter Meilinger
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:53:33 -0500, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>> Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
>> for free.
>How much are you paying for ink and paper?
Not a damned thing, if you do it at work.
Man, this is getting tempting...
Pete
Michael S. Schiffer
At that point, why not just get the book from the library and
xerox/scan it? Or buy it, copy it, and return it? If all someone
wants is a stack of laser paper and they're willing to spend some
time and effort to get it (and the law and ethics of the situation
don't strike them as an obstacle), they need never pay for any books
at all now.
Eric Walker
What is? Losing your job?
Nancy Lebovitz
I bet there's some way to automate siphoning the book out of Amazon.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Now, with bumper stickers
Using your turn signal is not "giving information to the enemy"
Konrad Gaertner
Indeed; I just happen to be be making lists of what I want to buy,
and got the following result:
: All 2465 results for steven erikson:
The good news is that the first 4 of those 2465 were the novels of
Steven Erikson.
I guess I have to say goodbye to the days when I could search for
something like "carole castle" and get only one hit (now 2860 hits).
Hmm, "sethra" still only gets one hit, but "lavode" gets five (four
of them actually show up prefaced with "Sethra"). Weird.
--KG
Konrad Gaertner
>
> I should mention that this is only a problem on the default search. If
> you go to "Advanced Search," you can specify that you're only looking
> for author's names or title keywords.
How do you get to the "Advanced Search"? I can't seem to find any
links to it.
--KG
Terry Austin
news:3F9EECFF...@worldnet.att.net:
>
>: All 2465 results for steven erikson:
>
> The good news is that the first 4 of those 2465 were the novels of
> Steven Erikson.
>
so
steven erikson
products the 2465 as noted, but
"steven erikson"
produces two under books, and two in zShops.
I'm not sure that's right, either, but it's at least something.
--
Terry Austin
tau...@hyperbooks.com
I love children. They taste like chicken.
http://www.cafeshops.com/hyperbooks
John Schilling
>schi...@spock.usc.edu (John Schilling) writes:
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>> >On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel <dsi...@canada.com>
>> >wrote:
>> >>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase" - what
>> >>does that do to copyright?
>> >That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly Not
>> >Happy about this development, especially since in some cases it's not
>> >clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow Amazon to do
>> >this.
>> Does Amazon understand that an unrestricted ability to ask "Which books
>> contains string X?", reduces the question "what is the full text of book
>> Y?" to an O(N) problem and an only moderately difficult hack?
>> More to the point, have they implemented appropriate countermeasures?
>I haven't been able to play with their search -- first of all it's
>*extremely* well hidden (they replaced their entire homepage with a
>letter announcing it, but didn't give a link to use it!!!!). And then
>I got into some sort of infinite loop on "authorizing" me (I've been a
>regular Amazon user for years, so they're doing something special for
>people using this new service).
>However, we thought about this issue a lot for the book text search on
>dragaera.info. We don't support a real phrase search, and give fairly
>small excerpts. This makes it quite a lot harder to get meaningful
>successive chunks of text.
But each small excerpt is a Very Big Hint as to where to search for
the next, and the process of retrieving and assembling the full text
from small excerpts can be automated.
>Also, it only took me a couple of hours each to manually scan and OCR
>Jhereg, Yendi, and Teckla; to my mind this indicates some sort of
>upper limit on how much trouble it's *worth* to protect the contents.
If you were competing against people trying to manually extract a
complete book (or library), yes. A few hours of most anyone's time
is worth more than the cost of even a typical hardback.
The competition here, is the hacker who will spend a caffeine-fueled
weekend coding up a bot that automatically extracts and reassembles
a book from a multitude of text searches at the touch of a "return"
key, the thousands of script kiddies who will use that tool once it
gets out, and the millions of Napsterites who will openly share the
entire contents of Amazon's library.
>> The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
>> unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
>> the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
>Gutenberg is quite careful to limit itself to the public domain, so
>the politics and effects are very different.
Exactly. Amazon is apparently *not* being careful, but putting some
huge fraction of its copyrighted inventory online with effectively
unrestricted access.
I can imagine effective countermeasures against book-snarfing bots,
of course. Mark Atwood reports that the system returns relatively
low-resolution images, which is a good start. But quite possibly
coincidental, and I'd feel a lot better if Amazon clearly indicated
that they understood the issue.
Online bookselling is a Good Thing; I don't want to see anyone
accidentally break the system.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Terry Austin
news:bnmrcc$lr8$1...@spock.usc.edu:
In point of fact, if one carefully selects a short phrase that is
reasonably unique ("Loiosh moved nervously"), one can do another search on
a phrase from the last of the two pages forward you can go, and go forward
another two pages. You have to rely on your OCR software to work very well,
but it does look like it could be automated. Very dicey implemenation, IMO.
Craig Richardson
>steve miller <che...@starswarmnews.com> writes:
>>
>> Most OCR readers are quite happy to work from an image...
>> it's only a minor technical problem, I expect.
>
>However, most good modern OCR software *really* wants a 1200dpi
>greyscale to start from. Amazon doesn't give that.
>
>(Personally, I think that a good "countermeasure" would be to add a
>blur to the page image on all parts of the page more than a couple of
>inchs away from the matching text.)
Assuming that all pages are compatible, return a half-page sized image
centered around the matching text, created by going a quarter-page up
and a quarter-page down, and grafting on part of the
previous/succeeding page, as required. A little more CPU-intensive
than blurring, but has the advantage of always returning sufficient
context, even when the search text is on the first or last line of a
page. And it would save CPU time currently used up by people
scrolling forward and backward.
--Craig
--
I start to wish Bob Melvin would walk out to the mound, ask Freddy if he
was injured, and then kick him in the balls so he can call in an
emergency replacement from the bullpen --Derek Zumsteg in BP, 5/13/2003
Craig Richardson
wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 16:05:38 GMT, Matt Ruff
><storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>>>
>>> You can do five pages per hit, 25% of the book per day per account.
>>> It's easy to start a new account on the spot and read the next 25%.
>>
>>It's probably even easier to just take the damn book out of the library,
>>or find a comfy chair at Barnes & Noble and read it there.
>
>That assumes you have a library or B&N somewhere nearby, and consider
>the hassle of plugging in credit card numbers greater than the hassle
>of getting the car out of the garage and driving to the library or
>bookstore -- or taking the subway, or walking, or whatever may apply
>in your particular situation.
>
>Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
>for free.
For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, $6/hour, it's not only
less hassle but more cost-effective just to buy the damn thing. And
you get a significantly better product.
Even if you outsource it, you end up with a "book" a tenth the quality
at a tenth the price. Big whoop.
IMO, this is one case where the theoretical damage - namely precedent
- is much worse in practice than the sum of any actual damage caused
by pirates.
David Silberstein
They are kinda sneaky that way, aren't they? But I just checked,
and this should work:
Set the "Search" dropdown to "Books"
Leave the search box *empty*.
Click the "Go" button.
You should get a page that offers a form with "Author", "Title",
"Subject", "ISBN" & "Publisher", as well as other refinements.
It also has something called "PowerSearch", which apparantly
allows boolean queries of various sorts.
I tried to see if I could paste in a direct link to this page,
but if one does so without going through the Amazon home page,
it pretends that one has a browser bug. Bah.
Konrad Gaertner
>
> Konrad Gaertner <kgae...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
> news:3F9EECFF...@worldnet.att.net:
> >
> >: All 2465 results for steven erikson:
> >
> > The good news is that the first 4 of those 2465 were the novels of
> > Steven Erikson.
> >
> If you put it in quotes, it goes for an exact phrase match (like Google),
I thought I'd tried that before and it didn't work...
> so
>
> steven erikson
>
> products the 2465 as noted, but
>
> "steven erikson"
>
> produces two under books, and two in zShops.
>
> I'm not sure that's right, either, but it's at least something.
Hrm. I just tried it, and "steven erikson" (searching only books)
returned 11 results (nearly all of which are really by him).
Removing the quotes, I get the same 11 results. Looks like the
full text search is disabled for me at the moment.
--KG
Konrad Gaertner
Thanks.
Playing around a bit, I found that if you click the "clear this form"
link then delete everything after and including "ref=", you'll get a
working link:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/static/-/books/search/
--KG
Terry Austin
> Terry Austin wrote:
>>
>> Konrad Gaertner <kgae...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in
>> news:3F9EECFF...@worldnet.att.net:
>> >
>> >: All 2465 results for steven erikson:
>> >
>> > The good news is that the first 4 of those 2465 were the novels of
>> > Steven Erikson.
>> >
>> If you put it in quotes, it goes for an exact phrase match (like
>> Google),
>
> I thought I'd tried that before and it didn't work...
Maybe it didn't, at the time, and they've adjusted it.
>
>> so
>>
>> steven erikson
>>
>> products the 2465 as noted, but
>>
>> "steven erikson"
>>
>> produces two under books, and two in zShops.
>>
>> I'm not sure that's right, either, but it's at least something.
>
> Hrm. I just tried it, and "steven erikson" (searching only books)
> returned 11 results (nearly all of which are really by him).
> Removing the quotes, I get the same 11 results. Looks like the
> full text search is disabled for me at the moment.
>
Oddness. I still get ~2500 results without quotes, 2+2 with.
Andrew Wheeler
>
> In article <3F9DCE19...@optonline.com>, acwh...@optonline.com wrote:
>
> > "David T. Bilek" wrote:
> > >
> > > Terry Austin <taustin...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
> > > >Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote in
> > > >news:bnjgi1$mkg$1...@bob.news.rcn.net:
> > > >
> > > >> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:48:51 -0400, Danny Sichel
> > > >> <dsi...@canada.com> wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>>"show the page within the book that features this word/phrase"
> > > >>>- what does that do to copyright?
> > > >>
> > > >> That's what a good many authors are asking. Some are decidedly
> > > >> Not Happy about this development, especially since in some cases
> > > >> it's not clear the publishers actually owned the right to allow
> > > >> Amazon to do this.
> > > >>
> > > >their books.
> > >
> > > For fiction, yes. Not necessarily so for non-fiction and reference
> > > works.
> >
> > I thought Lonely Planet has had success (well, *were having* success,
> > pre-9/11) with putting full-text versions of their books on their site
> > -- which would be at least anecdotal evidence that this kind of thing
> > can help non-fiction as well.
>
> What happened to Lonely Planet after 9/11?
The same thing that happened to everyone trying to sell travel books to
Westerners who suddenly weren't very interested in traveling...
(I think that sector of publishing is finally coming back, but it was a
bad couple of years.)
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
There are two groups of people: those who divide people into two groups
and those who don't.
-Robert Benchley
Pete McCutchen
<acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
>Though the publishers seem to all be worried about this project's effect
>on the sales of *non-fiction* (especially reference), and not expecting
>anything much to happen to fiction.
I'd think that cookbooks would be the real problem. While there are a
few cookbooks that can be read from cover to cover, most people use
only a few recipes per cookbook.
--
Pete McCutchen
steve miller
Moreno) wrote:
>steve miller <che...@starswarmnews.com> wrote:
>
>> Balance of Trade out now from embiid.com
>Which I immediately checked out and was quite sucked in, reading chapter
>after chapter with eagerness, until I'd read 23 and was looking for 24
>-- which wasn't available. No reason for panic I reassured myself, you
>can simply purchase it, you'd intended to anyway. But the only computer
>I have ready access to is a Mac, and so I find myself left out in the
>cold.
>Is my only hope to wait the 4 months for the release from Meisha Merlin?
>Or is there some chance embiid will be selling a html version?
I think not HTML -- I know that Embiid's just made a deal with
Mobipocket: all the Embiid books will be available that way as soon as
conversions can happen -- and for the moment that means the other
projects and long-range goals Richard had going (like the side-burner
Linux and Mac readers) are on hold until they can get caught up...
Steve
Visiting Conduit and TriNoc*Con in 2004
Balance of Trade out now from embiid.com
Low Port -- "unexpectedly rewarding" says PW
steve miller
>Here's a brief experiment I did:
>
>Searching on "hani" brought up 1100 results. A lot because of
>language, I believe, but too many to go through.
>Searching on "hani kif" brings up 38 results. Unfortunately, none are
>SF. There's several movie guides, some plays, and several
>middle-eastern oriented books. Apparently hani and kif are used in
>Arabic.
>Looking for Chanur brings it down to 27 books.
<snipped>
>Rebecca
Right -- and let's looks at a few others:
Delameter -- yields no "appropriate" genre results
Boksone -- yields no EE Smith, either
"Yngvi was a louse" no results...
"trantor" -- yields at #6 The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
(!?); mostt of the other early books of the #32 are computer books.
Evelyn C. Leeper
Actually, printing the page seems to result in a vertical compression of
it so that it's hard to read.
(We printed a couple of pages from film books that had quoted Mark's
reviews that we hadn't even known about.)
--
Evelyn C. Leeper
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
We need to be creating a world that we would like to live in when
we're not the biggest power on the block. --Bill Clinton
Evelyn C. Leeper
> On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 04:25:36 GMT, r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>
>
>>Here's a brief experiment I did:
>>
>>Searching on "hani" brought up 1100 results. A lot because of
>>language, I believe, but too many to go through.
>>Searching on "hani kif" brings up 38 results. Unfortunately, none are
>>SF. There's several movie guides, some plays, and several
>>middle-eastern oriented books. Apparently hani and kif are used in
>>Arabic.
>>Looking for Chanur brings it down to 27 books.
>
>
> <snipped>
>
>>Rebecca
>
>
> Right -- and let's looks at a few others:
>
> Delameter -- yields no "appropriate" genre results
>
> Boksone -- yields no EE Smith, either
Maybe because it's "Boskone"? :-)
Craig Richardson
Sad to say, but buggy-whips are obsolete, too. I have one print
cookbook that wasn't a gift, and I find online recipes quite
sufficient so far, although I'm hardly Iron (probably proceeding from
Straw to Balsa, depending on how the scale is calibrated).
Bill Snyder
<che...@starswarmnews.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 04:25:36 GMT, r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>
>>Here's a brief experiment I did:
>>
>>Searching on "hani" brought up 1100 results. A lot because of
>>language, I believe, but too many to go through.
>>Searching on "hani kif" brings up 38 results. Unfortunately, none are
>>SF. There's several movie guides, some plays, and several
>>middle-eastern oriented books. Apparently hani and kif are used in
>>Arabic.
>>Looking for Chanur brings it down to 27 books.
>
><snipped>
>>Rebecca
>
>Right -- and let's looks at a few others:
>
>Delameter -- yields no "appropriate" genre results
They're probably in there someplace, since searching on that in
combination with "lensman" gives 68 hits.
>Boksone -- yields no EE Smith, either
As Evelyn says, the spelling error is to blame.
>"Yngvi was a louse" no results...
I think you'll find that "Yngvi IS a louse" does better.
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
steve miller
<ele...@optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>> Boksone -- yields no EE Smith, either
>
>Maybe because it's "Boskone"? :-)
NSS -- the search was correct, it's the dyslexic fingers that weren't.
Try it.
Dave B.
>
>>>
>>> Boksone -- yields no EE Smith, either
>>
>>Maybe because it's "Boskone"? :-)
>
>NSS -- the search was correct, it's the dyslexic fingers that weren't.
>
>Try it.
>
Whoever holds the copywrite for E.E. Smith's works hasn't given Amazon
permission to add his works to their database. Thus you can't view or search on
any of his text.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:53:33 -0500, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
>wrote:
>
>>That assumes you have a library or B&N somewhere nearby, and consider
>>the hassle of plugging in credit card numbers greater than the hassle
>>of getting the car out of the garage and driving to the library or
>>bookstore -- or taking the subway, or walking, or whatever may apply
>>in your particular situation.
>>
>>Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
>>for free.
>
>For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, $6/hour, it's not only
>less hassle but more cost-effective just to buy the damn thing. And
>you get a significantly better product.
Generally speaking, sure -- but that assumes you want the whole book,
and not a single story or article, and also ignores the hordes of high
school and college students whose time is NOT accounted worth more
than $6/hr.
It also ignores the really expensive books -- textbooks, PoD, etc.
But all in all, yeah, it's probably not a serious issue in at least
95% of cases. The problem is that Amazon hasn't considered the other
maybe-as-much-as-5%.
>IMO, this is one case where the theoretical damage - namely precedent
>- is much worse in practice than the sum of any actual damage caused
>by pirates.
I'd agree.
John M. Gamble
>Here's a brief experiment I did:
>
>Searching on "hani" brought up 1100 results. A lot because of
Someone on comp.risks (Risks Digest 22.98) did a similar experiment:
<text from comp.risks>
I decided on "Call me Ishmael." [For RISKS'
international audience, this is the opening line of Herman Melville's Moby
Dick, quite possibly the most famous opening line in all of American
literature.]
The results are interesting: 2704 books are found, the 1st is "Call me
Ishmael," the 2nd is "Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals," the 3rd
is "The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection
Pile," and the 4th is "Programming Windows with C# (Core Reference)" !!
The highest rated match that directly relates to Moby Dick is the
Cliffs Notes at #15. Moby Dick itself isn't in the top 20. <sigh>
Drew Dean, Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International
</text from comp.risks>
>
>I think that the idea would be more useful if the cover blurbs and
>lists of books published hadn't been included in the scanned material.
>And, at least in this case, it wasn't at all useful for finding a book
>where you didn't remember the title but could remember the species
>names.
>
Breaking down the search into contexts, such as "blurb" or "chapter
title" might have been useful, but it probably wouldn't have leant
itself to mass OCR, which doesn't require as much individual
judgement.
--
-john
February 28 1997: Last day libraries could order catalogue cards
from the Library of Congress.
Nancy Lebovitz
Konrad Gaertner <gae...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>I guess I have to say goodbye to the days when I could search for
>something like "carole castle" and get only one hit (now 2860 hits).
Probably not. The current system makes the site much less useful
for a lot of people.
I expect that Amazon will notice (I bet a lot of people are telling
them), and do something sensible, like having a search author/title
vs. search text choice handy.
Bill Snyder
wrote:
Oh, duh. Not Google, Amazon.
I meant to do that. Honest. Now move along, nothing to see here,
people . . .
J.B. Moreno
> pl...@newsreaders.com (J.B. Moreno) wrote:
>
> >But the only computer I have ready access to is a Mac, and so I find
> >myself left out in the cold.
>
> >Is my only hope to wait the 4 months for the release from Meisha Merlin?
> >Or is there some chance embiid will be selling a html version?
>
> I think not HTML -- I know that Embiid's just made a deal with
> Mobipocket: all the Embiid books will be available that way as soon as
> conversions can happen -- and for the moment that means the other
> projects and long-range goals Richard had going (like the side-burner
> Linux and Mac readers) are on hold until they can get caught up...
Is the objection to HTML yours or Embiid's? IIRC fictionwise will do so
if requested by the author.
--
JBM
"Everything is futile." -- Marvin of Borg
Terry Austin
> On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:30:12 -0800, Craig Richardson
> <crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:53:33 -0500, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>That assumes you have a library or B&N somewhere nearby, and consider
>>>the hassle of plugging in credit card numbers greater than the hassle
>>>of getting the car out of the garage and driving to the library or
>>>bookstore -- or taking the subway, or walking, or whatever may apply
>>>in your particular situation.
>>>
>>>Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
>>>for free.
>>
>>For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, $6/hour, it's not only
>>less hassle but more cost-effective just to buy the damn thing. And
>>you get a significantly better product.
>
> Generally speaking, sure -- but that assumes you want the whole book,
> and not a single story or article, and also ignores the hordes of high
> school and college students whose time is NOT accounted worth more
> than $6/hr.
>
> It also ignores the really expensive books -- textbooks, PoD, etc.
>
> But all in all, yeah, it's probably not a serious issue in at least
> 95% of cases. The problem is that Amazon hasn't considered the other
> maybe-as-much-as-5%.
I suspect that, like OCR'ing real books and posting them to usenet, the
only people ripping off books from Amazon will be doing so in order to be
stealing, rather than to get the book. In short, they are people who aren't
going to buy the book anyway. Anybody who wants the book will want a
_book_.
--
Terry Austin
tau...@hyperbooks.com
http://www.hyperbooks.com/
Roleplaying Stuff
Eric Walker
>Matt Ruff wrote:
>>
>> I should mention that this is only a problem on the default
>> search. If you go to "Advanced Search," you can specify
>> that you're only looking for author's names or title
>> keywords.
>
>How do you get to the "Advanced Search"? I can't seem to find
>any links to it.
From the front page, click on the "Books" tab. That takes you
to a page with a "Search" subtab under the "Books" tab; click
on that and you're there.
<TOUT>
Or you can try--
http://greatsfandf.com/NATIONALS/ussearch.shtml
--which is, I hope and believe, a better front end to Amazon.
(The long introductory text block can be skipped--after having
once been read--by clicking on "jump to box", which is right at
the top of the page; but please read it all once.)
</TOUT>
Amazon's database has a stunning number of defects, as does the
algorithm they use to search. Quoting from the page mentioned
above:
I have campaigned long and loud with Amazon to try to get
them to clean up their database so that its entries reflect
author and book names just as they appear on the books in
question, and I think I may have at least awakened them to
sales they're missing owing to mis-entered data--but think of
the volume of titles needing correcting! My estimate is that
10% to 15% of their books cannot be found by any search
anyone looking for the book is likely to make--just try to
find a James Blaylock book filed as being by "James Baylock",
or a Ray Bradbury by "Brad Bradburg"!
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
http://greatsfandf.com
Eric Walker
>On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:33:26 GMT, Pete McCutchen
><p.mcc...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
[...]
>
>>I'd think that cookbooks would be the real problem. While
>>there are a few cookbooks that can be read from cover to
>>cover, most people use only a few recipes per cookbook.
>
>Sad to say, but buggy-whips are obsolete, too. I have one
>print cookbook that wasn't a gift, and I find online recipes
>quite sufficient so far, although I'm hardly Iron (probably
>proceeding from Straw to Balsa, depending on how the scale is
>calibrated).
My lady is firm on discarding cookbooks (too often received as
gifts from well-intentioned friends) in which she finds little
of interest; yet we have between three and four dozen in fairly
active use, and we do not consider ourselves to be "gourmet
cooks" or any such thing, just folks who like a good meal.
Craig Richardson
wrote:
>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:30:12 -0800, Craig Richardson
><crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:53:33 -0500, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
>>wrote:
>>>Not to mention you can print Amazon's pages, and have a permanent copy
>>>for free.
>>
>>For anyone whose time is worth more than, say, $6/hour, it's not only
>>less hassle but more cost-effective just to buy the damn thing. And
>>you get a significantly better product.
>
>Generally speaking, sure -- but that assumes you want the whole book,
>and not a single story or article, and also ignores the hordes of high
>school and college students whose time is NOT accounted worth more
>than $6/hr.
Well, for students, we already nod and wink if they spend a couple of
hours at the library photocopier.
>It also ignores the really expensive books -- textbooks, PoD, etc.
Follow the money. It doesn't really matter how much the going price
for a book is. The point is that spamming Amazon doesn't get a
significantly better or cheaper product than OCR/photocopying will do
otherwise. It might be trivially better, but while there's some
piracy now, it's not destructive. From my understanding of the
technology involved, it's not that much of a quantum leap.
>But all in all, yeah, it's probably not a serious issue in at least
>95% of cases. The problem is that Amazon hasn't considered the other
>maybe-as-much-as-5%.
That said, it's still possible that, even if there's no potential for
widespread damage, that there will still be some. So current remedies
must be enforced.
>>IMO, this is one case where the theoretical damage - namely precedent
>>- is much worse in practice than the sum of any actual damage caused
>>by pirates.
>
>I'd agree.
The important thing is that we not succumb to a rush to judgement.
It's not the death of the copyright system as we know it - although it
might be the death of the Amazon search engine[1]. Even so, it's
better to hew fairly close to the copyright line, until there is a
different consensus among the public at large.
--Craig
[1] Did they not have any technical advisors? Amazon could easily
hire people currently jobless who could tell them exactly what is
wrong with their new system...
Nancy Lebovitz
Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>
>I suspect that, like OCR'ing real books and posting them to usenet, the
>only people ripping off books from Amazon will be doing so in order to be
>stealing, rather than to get the book. In short, they are people who aren't
>going to buy the book anyway. Anybody who wants the book will want a
>_book_.
If that article I read a while ago in _Wired_ about the warez culture
is accurate, it's not even people who were going to read the book. The
goal is just to pile up as much pirated information as possible.
John F. Carr
Craig Richardson <crichar...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 00:10:29 -0500, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
>wrote:
>
>>and not a single story or article, and also ignores the hordes of high
>>school and college students whose time is NOT accounted worth more
>>than $6/hr.
>
>Well, for students, we already nod and wink if they spend a couple of
>hours at the library photocopier.
There is a library exception in US copyright law. It is legal
to copy an article from a magazine or journal, or a small part
of a book, as long as you are copying a library copy at a library.
Copying an entire book is still out of bounds, and the library
can be liable if they nod and wink.
(The _library_ can make a copy of an entire book for its own use
under some circumstances, basically if the book is unpublished
or out of print.)
>[1] Did they not have any technical advisors? Amazon could easily
>hire people currently jobless who could tell them exactly what is
>wrong with their new system...
They may be trying to make the system visible. Remember the
"people who read books buy underwear" links? I noticed the
first time a search found text inside a book.
--
John Carr (j...@mit.edu)
Jon Meltzer
"Matt Ruff" <storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3F9E9208...@worldnet.att.net...
> The other day I was looking for a novel by the author Matt Mcintosh. I
> got 769 hits. Hit #1 was the 2002 Sports Encyclopedia, which contains
> statistical entries for players Matt Howard and Tim Mcintosh. Hit #2 was
> a political non-fiction book that mentions House Reps. Matt Salmon and
> David Mcintosh. Hit #3 was "Screen World 2000," which includes a movie
> cast list with actors Matt Lucas and Neve Mcintosh...
The prime real estate is on screen 1 - the first 10 or so entries on the
list; and Amazon is going to charge publishers for placement on it. Just
watch.
Peter Meilinger
>On 28 Oct 2003 20:09:22 GMT, Peter Meilinger wrote:
>>>How much are you paying for ink and paper?
>>
>>Not a damned thing, if you do it at work.
>>
>>Man, this is getting tempting...
>What is? Losing your job?
That, too, some days.
Pete
Evelyn C. Leeper
> In article <3F9EECFF...@worldnet.att.net>,
> Konrad Gaertner <gae...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>I guess I have to say goodbye to the days when I could search for
>>something like "carole castle" and get only one hit (now 2860 hits).
>
>
> Probably not. The current system makes the site much less useful
> for a lot of people.
>
> I expect that Amazon will notice (I bet a lot of people are telling
> them), and do something sensible, like having a search author/title
> vs. search text choice handy.
Well, I actually asked amazon.com about this and got:
You can use the Power Search to send us complex descriptions of books
you are looking for. Simply follow the syntax in one of the examples
below:
author: Niven
author: Niven and not Larry Niven
author: Niven and not Larry Niven and subject: number
author: ambrose and binding: (abridged or large print) and
pubdate: after 11-1996
keywords: "high tech*" and not fiction and pubdate: during 1999
title: electric and sheep and not author: dick
title: (winter or astrological) and gardening
isbn: 0446394319 or 0306806819 or 1567993850
Peter Meilinger
>Generally speaking, sure -- but that assumes you want the whole book,
>and not a single story or article, and also ignores the hordes of high
>school and college students whose time is NOT accounted worth more
>than $6/hr.
>It also ignores the really expensive books -- textbooks, PoD, etc.
Especially textbooks. I'm amazed a Napster-like sharing system
hasn't already sprung up for college textbooks. If someone
can figure out a reasonably easy way to steal textbooks
off Amazon, I'd imagine a fair amount of people will at
least try it out.
Pete
Mike Schilling
"Nancy Lebovitz" <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote in message
news:DKNnb.1011$jg7.1...@newshog.newsread.com...
> In article <Xns9422EE78BE81Fta...@216.168.3.50>,
> Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
> >
> >I suspect that, like OCR'ing real books and posting them to usenet, the
> >only people ripping off books from Amazon will be doing so in order to be
> >stealing, rather than to get the book. In short, they are people who
aren't
> >going to buy the book anyway. Anybody who wants the book will want a
> >_book_.
>
> If that article I read a while ago in _Wired_ about the warez culture
> is accurate, it's not even people who were going to read the book. The
> goal is just to pile up as much pirated information as possible.
That seemed to be true of the idiot who was posting bad scans here of SF
books. AFAICT, he hadn't even read them.
Evelyn C. Leeper
The New York Times ran an article on this about a week ago:
Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas
By TAMAR LEWIN (NYT) 1667 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 4
ABSTRACT - American college students find that their textbooks cost far
less overseas than they do in United States; more and more individual
students and college bookstores are ordering textbooks from abroad;
National Assn of College Bookstores has written to all leading
publishers asking them to end practice they see as unfair to American
students; publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying
foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to
local market conditions; textbook publishers have tried to block
reimporting of American texts from overseas; Supreme Court ruled in 1998
that federal copyright law does not protect American manufacturers from
having products they arrange to sell overseas at discount shipped back
for sale in US; photo; chart (M)
r.r...@thevine.net
I remember when I was in college the big concern was used textbooks.
The publishers were complaining bitterly that part of the reason
textbooks cost so much was because of the lost sales due to people
selling used copies. Personally, I always thought it was outrageous
to spend $80+ on a book that I was only going to use for one semester,
when I could pick it up used for 40ish (which still seemed like
highway robbery to me). Unfortunately, I was the last year in the
revision cycle, which means I could find lots of used books, but they
had no resale value because the next class needed the new revision.
Rebecca
Justin Bacon
>>Sad to say, but buggy-whips are obsolete, too. I have one
>>print cookbook that wasn't a gift, and I find online recipes
>>quite sufficient so far, although I'm hardly Iron (probably
>>proceeding from Straw to Balsa, depending on how the scale is
>>calibrated).
>
>My lady is firm on discarding cookbooks (too often received as
>gifts from well-intentioned friends) in which she finds little
>of interest; yet we have between three and four dozen in fairly
>active use, and we do not consider ourselves to be "gourmet
>cooks" or any such thing, just folks who like a good meal.
Eric's completely right on this one. If cookbooks were obsolete or
out-of-style, there wouldn't be so many of them in print.
Justin Bacon
tria...@aol.com
Matt Ruff
>
> Matt Ruff wrote:
>
>> I should mention that this is only a problem on the default search. If
>> you go to "Advanced Search," you can specify that you're only looking
>> for author's names or title keywords.
>
> How do you get to the "Advanced Search"? I can't seem to find any
> links to it.
Top of the page, second line of tabs, click on "Search"* (to the left of
"Browse Subjects") and it'll take you to a special page that lets you
specify what kind of search -- author, title, subject -- you're making.
*Sorry for the confusion -- I could have sworn it was called "Advanced
Search," but I seem to've just imagined the adjective.
-- M. Ruff
Terry Austin
news:DKNnb.1011$jg7.1...@newshog.newsread.com:
> In article <Xns9422EE78BE81Fta...@216.168.3.50>,
> Terry Austin <tau...@hyperbooks.com> wrote:
>>
>>I suspect that, like OCR'ing real books and posting them to usenet,
>>the only people ripping off books from Amazon will be doing so in
>>order to be stealing, rather than to get the book. In short, they are
>>people who aren't going to buy the book anyway. Anybody who wants the
>>book will want a _book_.
>
> If that article I read a while ago in _Wired_ about the warez culture
> is accurate, it's not even people who were going to read the book. The
> goal is just to pile up as much pirated information as possible.
That would be consistent with what I've seen, yes. And those people are not
a problem, from a business standpoint. There will be a few who will get
copies from those people who *might* have bought the book otherwise, but I
doubt it would be many.
--
Terry Austin
tau...@hyperbooks.com
I love children. They taste like chicken.
http://www.cafeshops.com/hyperbooks
Matt Ruff
>
> David Dyer-Bennet writes:
>
>> John Schilling writes:
>
>>> The Gutenberg Project pales in comparison to what this will otherwise
>>> unleash. And while that's not an *entirely* bad thing, well, we've had
>>> the Death of Copyright discussion here many times before.
>>
>> Gutenberg is quite careful to limit itself to the public domain, so
>> the politics and effects are very different.
>
> Exactly. Amazon is apparently *not* being careful, but putting some
> huge fraction of its copyrighted inventory online with effectively
> unrestricted access.
I still don't see any significant difference between this and a
well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore or library. Being able to read
or skim books for free is not a new thing. Neither is being able to make
inferior copies of them by Xeroxing, OCRing, etc.
-- M. Ruff
Niall McAuley
> I still don't see any significant difference between this and a
> well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore or library. Being able to read
> or skim books for free is not a new thing. Neither is being able to make
> inferior copies of them by Xeroxing, OCRing, etc.
Being able to search them for keywords *is* new.
--
Niall [real address ends in com, not moc.invalid]
Default User
> Well, for students, we already nod and wink if they spend a couple of
> hours at the library photocopier.
Every library I've used, whether public or university, charged to use
the copier. It's a small amount per copy, which isn't a big deal for
small experpts, but copying an entire book would no be cost effective,
not even including the time.
Brian Rodenborn
Peter Meilinger
Depends on the book. College textbooks have already been mentioned.
Some of those are priced insanely high. And when I was in college,
it wasn't all that hard to get access to a free photocopier for an
hour or so. Depends on who you know and where you work, I guess.
Pete
wth...@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu
>
> The New York Times ran an article on this about a week ago:
>
> Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas
As much as $50?
In grad school the students from Asia tended to
have excellent collections of physics texts.
The complete Landau and Lifshitz, for example,
at $2 (today's money) per volume. Terrible
paper, terrible binding, but the content was
there.
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
Terry Austin
news:bnoqi4$qt4$1...@newstree.wise.edt.ericsson.se:
> "Matt Ruff" <storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> news:3F9FEC0...@worldnet.att.net...
>> I still don't see any significant difference between this and a
>> well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore or library. Being able to
>> read or skim books for free is not a new thing. Neither is being able
>> to make inferior copies of them by Xeroxing, OCRing, etc.
>
> Being able to search them for keywords *is* new.
But unrelated to piracy.
(And it's not as new as you think. Just being done a bigger scale. Even if
you ignore just _reading_ the book at the library.)
Terry Austin
news:3F9FF4FE...@boeing.com.invalid:
Neither is printing it from a computer, which costs at least as much, and
more if you have an inkjet printer.
Konrad Gaertner
>
> Konrad Gaertner wrote:
> >
> > Matt Ruff wrote:
> >
> >> I should mention that this is only a problem on the default search. If
> >> you go to "Advanced Search," you can specify that you're only looking
> >> for author's names or title keywords.
> >
> > How do you get to the "Advanced Search"? I can't seem to find any
> > links to it.
>
> Top of the page, second line of tabs, click on "Search"* (to the left of
> "Browse Subjects") and it'll take you to a special page that lets you
> specify what kind of search -- author, title, subject -- you're making.
Can't figure out what you're talking about here. The tab with the
word "search" isn't a link. And clicking "Go" without without
entering anything nor restricting the serach to books gets treated
as a search for the null string.
--KG