How Amazon can make money from books you already own.
We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of “find me something I’ve never seen before.” But real-life search is often different: You’re looking for something you have seen before, but you’ve somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution’s impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it’s in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can’t remember which one. | “Search inside” could be the perfect solution to this common problem. —Steven Johnson —The Best Search Idea Since Google (Slate)
Amazon’s “Search Inside” is starting to feel more and more like Vannevar Bush’s memex.
The chance for a book to be sold when the searcher finds a snippet in it is much higher than before (when the searcher didn’t even know about the book depending on the search query). And for every book sold, the author gets the percentage and thus makes more money. That the search is not perfect is another issue but shouldn’t let us disregard the whole idea.
As a scholar, I love it. As an author, I hate it. Until Amazon offers authors a “pay per hit” royalty, their search function as it presently exists is patently illegal. They need to make it so that only one page — or even ONE PARAGRAPH — appears on screen. I applaud them for pushing the envelope, but here’s yet another example of something scientific and instrumental that shouldn’t be done, just because we can. Information wants to be free, but who wants to provide new info if there’s no incentive to do so? What’s in it for the writer — the person who produces these pages that are being given away for free online? Sales? I doubt it. I hate to be so conservative on this issue, but I fear that the paradigm shift that’s happening is too consumer/user-oriented. Open source is great for some media, but not all. Musicians can still pay the bills from their concert performances even if all their songs are free online. Advertising supports TV and film media. There are ways of generating profit and reward and incentive for these other media. But print media? Book writers? There’s nothing. They get little enough from their publishers for the honor of being in print as it is. Royalty rates on a book are rarely over 15%. My opinion might change over time — after all, people might start buying more books when they stumble upon those that they wouldn’t know about otherwise, but right now this all seems pretty dangerous to the very publishing economy that supports Amazon. And it’s flawed, too. One writer on the Slate discussion boards pointed out that typing in “call me ishmael” in Amazon doesn’t turn up MOBY DICK right away, but BORED OF THE RINGS instead…whereas a Google search will send you right to Amazon’s sales page for MOBY DICK. http://fray.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&m=8608457