Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a message on the front page of Amazon’s site today:
Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside the Book — the name of this new feature — searches the complete inside text of more than 120,000 books — all 33 million pages of them.
They’re also giving away a Segway transporter in a related contest.
What Bezos doesn’t say is that Amazon (which perhaps had little choice in the matter) buckled under pressure and disabled some important features of the new service. The San Jose Merc carried this account today:
Authors mollified on searching feature
Internet retailer 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.
The feature, called “Search Inside the Book,” allows users to search the complete text of books for words and phrases. Until Friday, said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, users could also print out several pages surrounding the places where the phrase appears.
Authors were concerned that readers might print out recipes from cookbooks, hotel recommendations from travel guides and other such reference material instead of actually buying the book, said Aiken, whose group includes more than 8,000 authors. He was pleased that Friday, when the guild attempted to print pages, it could not, Aiken said.
Steve Kessel, a vice president for Seattle-based Amazon.com, refused to confirm that Amazon.com changed the feature or whether users have the ability to print pages from books. He cited security concerns.
I’m not a member of the Authors Guild, but I can tell you that the Guild doesn’t speak for all authors or writers, and that in this case their reactionary stance has hobbled a cool and useful tool that could have driven considerably higher sales, were it not for the Digital Rights Management restrictions placed on this feature today.
As it stands, no one can print out a page (the preferred way of reading book pages). If you do a screen shot and try to print out the captured page in a program such as Photoshop, it won’t work (or, at least, it didn’t for me). Neither can you copy and paste from the selected page. Nor can you do a search for the search term to find it on the page (Amazon doesn’t highlight the word or phrase).
This makes Amazon’s Inside the Book feature all but useless for me. I know that my screen settings are somewhat out of the ordinary — I’ve got a 1600-pixel ViewSonic monitor and turned off the default type size so that I can read type faces at a reasonable size (that is, greater than font size 2, or 10 pixels tall, the default size on too many websites and blogs). So under Amazon’s configuration, I can’t read the type on the screen — and now I can’t read the page by printing it out.
I’ll eagerly await word of any programmer who provides a hack for this unreasonable, regressive and backwards-thinking set of restrictions which have neutered an otherwise estimable advance in book ecommerce.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
The page images are easy enough to print if you use Mozilla Firebird. Select Tools * Page Info, and then clikc the Media tab. Scroll through the images until you find the page image. The click Save As. Open it in your favorite graphics viewer, and print it.
Or, you can just use a screen capture program.
As an author, I welcome this new feature at Amazon. People can go to any bookstore and browse as long as they like. Why not allow them to do so at Amazon? Sure, some people will find the answer they need, and not buy the book. But that also happens at book stores (and even libraries).