Amazon Dreams
More reasons why librarians wish they were the online bookseller
Francine Fialkoff, Editor -- Library Journal, 11/15/2003
"The idea is mind-blowing," says academic librarian Barbara Fister (Gustavus Adolphus Coll., St. Peter, MN), one of those who played with the new feature. While librarians have been integrating technology to make searching of their article and reference databases seamless, Amazon has taken its book catalog and turned it into an information source. "It folds books back into this new way of thinking about research or information or even pleasure reading," says Fister.
So what's inside Search Inside? Wired magazine reporter Gary Wolf calls it an "unrivaled digital archive," a 21st-century version of the ancient library in Alexandria. For some users Search Inside will be an end in itself. They will not need to go any further. Paul Wiener, associate university librarian, SUNY at Stony Brook, easily found references to his university, Kofi Annan, and Smithtown, Long Island. Searches for characters in books are a snap, and if the book is digitized (most were published before 2003), the page(s) on which the character appears will be displayed and users can print them out. (Usually two to three pages before and after the page on which the search term appears can be viewed and printed.) Pages say "copyrighted material," but nothing impedes printing.
Wolf points to the "power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen," as when a search for Boss Tweed brings him to a list of books that writer/editor Pete Hamill used to create the portrait of Tweed in his novel Forever. Such serendipity is something I associate with browsing the shelves in a library, not with catalog searches. Yet my own search for the first line of the poem "Invictus," which returned 34,986 hits when I put in the first line and the word "poem" and 313 hits when I put in the first line and the title, brought its own strange serendipity. I got the full text of the poem, not from one of the standard anthologies but from Songs of Wall Street: An Anthology of Verse for Literary Investors (Running Pr., 2001). On the succeeding page was a parody, "Convictus": "Out of the hands of the SEC/ Back from the Pit where the felons board/ I thank the lawyers who earned their fees/ For my undiminished hoard." Poets may be among those less than happy with the new service, since poems are often just one page or two. Other authors, like cookbook writers, may have similar concerns.
Search Inside's tools are rather cumbersome right now and deliver way too many hits, but its promise has librarians on the discussion lists lamenting they didn't get there first. "It may kick us all into reconceptualizing our catalogs," says Fister, who had just come back from a meeting about MARC 21—talk about cumbersome—when we spoke.
Opening up Amazon's catalog has the potential of fulfilling publishers' dreams of keeping books in print, and on sale, forever. In an unintended consequence for Amazon, however, Search Inside can send savvy users to the library, just like Amazon.com already does. Librarians, or library patrons, can toggle from Amazon to their own libraries' catalogs.
Wiener goes one step further and proposes that Amazon could "offer libraries this search service for a fee, if a library gave them a list of its book holdings." Despite Wiener's contention that academic libraries would be "little threat" to Amazon, his suggestion is unlikely to find favor either with Amazon or the 190 publishers with whom it has thus far negotiated contracts.
It's still much too soon to predict the full potential of Search Inside, whether for Amazon or for libraries. It signals a loosening of publishers' fears about access to digitized works. It will breathe new life into older books buried in library catalogs and stacks. And it will likely create new user expectations, as both Google and Amazon did.
