Authors' Guild objects to Amazon fulltext searching
Others have commented on Amazon's recent addition of full-text searching to its website. The Authors' Guild doesn't seem to be impressed, and objects that the publishers do not have the right to supply full text access without the authors' permission. More discussion here, and here, and at the Volokh Conspiracy. One of their concerns is that students and others will use Amazon's fulltext snippets as a way to look up essays, chapters, or statements from books and print or otherwise use them without buying the book.
Yes, these are the same folks who pettishly whined a while back about Amazon offering used books for sale. Perhaps this time they will have a legal leg to stand on, at least until book publishers incorporate mandatory surrender of all electronic full text rights into their "boilerplate" contract, as many periodicals publishers did after the Tasini v. New York Times decision.
My own thoughts about the usefulness of this feature are mixed. I can imagine plenty of situations in which this kind of search might be useful, but in many other kinds of searches it's just plain annoying. "Googling" full text via Amazon may help find forgotten titles featuring a certain character, or referring to some specific person, place or thing, but as any librarian knows, there are times when it's more useful to search only within data fields of limited scope but particular importance, like "subject" or "author". Just imagine trying to look through every book that casually refers to, say, Abraham Lincoln. Wouldn't it be more useful, if you want information about Honest Abe, to limit your searching only to books that list him as a major subject heading? Or contained enough lengthy passages from his speeches and papers that he was listed as an author?
For example: when I searched Amazon for "Frisco Railroad", I got "Where the Red Fern Grows" as the number-one result. Now, it's very nice that that fictional boy and his fictional dogs went walking between the Frisco Railroad and the Illinois River, but it hardly gives me the maps of Newburg Yard or the diagrams of the 1306-class freight locomotives that I'm looking for. The phrase occurs only once in the book, according to Amazon, so it appears that they're ranking the search results at least in part according to popularity and/or sales. This is not necessarily good.
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Carlos @ 1:25PM | 2003-10-27| permalink
Seems that it wouldn't be difficult for Amazon to allow users to turn off the full text option, but I don't know that much about computers.
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Pablo @ 4:38PM | 2003-10-27| permalink
I tried it this morning. It didn't impress me. It seems that the books will either be so old that they'd be on Project Gutenburg or so new that they'd likely be ephemeral.
Also, I didn't see that they allow for searching quotes, which is probably deliberate, since they're trying to sell books, not provide free online academic resources.
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Trebor @ 8:15PM | 2003-10-27| permalink
All that is very interesitng, but I still can't figure out the difference between Napster I and Google. Napster I indexed user's directories each time they logged in and allowed all users full text searches of its indexes. It would then provide its location. It didn't actually store any of the copyrighted material.
Google goes a step further and indexes the full text of material located in directories (but only on web servers). It then allows user to search its indexes and provides them with the selected item's location.
It's a weird wired world.
~ Trevor
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Anon @ 12:16PM | 2003-10-28| permalink
Haven't you ever remembered a particular phrase or quote out of a book, but not the title or author? Sometimes I remember whole paragraphs. For those of us whose minds sometimes work in funny ways, this is great!
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Anon @ 12:16PM | 2003-10-28| permalink
Haven't you ever remembered a particular phrase or quote out of a book, but not the title or author? Sometimes I remember whole paragraphs. For those of us whose minds sometimes work in funny ways, this is great!
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Felix @ 11:36AM | 2003-10-29| permalink
Carlos: It is still possible to go to Amazon's "advanced search" page, which has search lines for title, author, etc. I think that's the closest one can come to "turning it off". Of course many casual users will never use anything but the default search page.
Pablo: One of the Authors' Guild's concerns is exactly what you asked about, the likelihood that people could use this feature to locate isolated quotes or snippets from reference books and avoid buying, say, a dictionary or comparable item that consists mainly of short entries.
Trebor: I've wondered about this, too. Of course, Google has been known to take down links due to legal threats. I also wonder whether Google's caching feature is strictly legal, although there doesn't seem to be anybody urgently demanding that they abolish it. I suspect that the difference is primarily political.
Anon: Welcome to the ongoing chaos. I have had situations like you describe; in fact, just yesterday, someone on a discussion list for fiction librarians said that Amazon's fulltext search had helped her find a book that someone was looking for. THe person couldn't remembe the author or title, but remembered some significant terms from the plot. So I acknowledge that it can be useful. I'm not particularly pleased about being automatically sent to it as the default search setting, though, since in my experience titles and authors (and occasionally subject headings) are the main ways people search for books, music, and other media material, and this search method doesn't work terribly well for them.
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