The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone · 14 Oct 2013 · 380pp · 118,675 words
bookstore by allowing customers to browse through the first few pages of any title. Manber took that idea much further. He proposed a service called Search Inside the Book that would let customers look for specific words or phrases from any book they had purchased. Bezos loved the idea and raised the stakes: he
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sit as long as you want and read any book you want. Which one do you think will sell more books?” Publishers were concerned that Search Inside the Book might open up the floodgates of online piracy. Most, however, agreed to try it out and gave Amazon physical copies of their titles, which were
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set aside for emergencies. He was allowed to commandeer those machines, although with the understanding that they could be taken back at any time. Amazon introduced Search Inside the Book on October 2003—and for the first time in three and a half years, there was a feature story on the company in Wired magazine
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bookstore that stocked every book ever written. Perhaps such a universal library could be digital and thus infinitely more practical? Bezos cautiously told Wired that Search Inside the Book could indeed be such a beginning. “You have to start somewhere,” he said. “You climb the top of the first tiny hill and from there
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at A9.com was a failure and was shut down a year after Manber left. Block View would be overtaken by Google’s Street View. Search Inside the Book was interesting but hardly a game changer, and the world’s best engineers were fleeing a poisonous Amazon culture and flocking to Google and other
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containing extraordinarily detailed recommendations and frequently arriving late at night. Amazon started using Mechanical Turk internally in 2005 to have humans do things like review Search Inside the Book scans and check product images uploaded to Amazon by customers to ensure they were not pornographic. The company also used Mechanical Turk to match the
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on a PC screen, but the e-book store was well hidden on the Amazon website and yielded few sales. Look Inside the Book and Search Inside the Book were arguably digital-reading efforts, but their purpose was to improve the shopping experience and increase the sales of physical books. As the negotiations with
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independent bookshops, and adding to Amazon’s growing market power. Around this time, Amazon representatives made the rounds asking publishers to submit titles for its Search Inside the Book program. Meanwhile, Google had begun scanning library books without the permission of copyright owners, part of a massive effort to make the world’s literary
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them to acknowledge the existence of the Kindle, which remained top secret. So Rose and Steele were forced to approach the topic circuitously, talking up Search Inside the Book and an e-book standard created by the French company Mobipocket, which Amazon acquired in 2005 to jump-start its e-book initiative. Owning Mobi
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, Amazon developers conceived of a potential shortcut to their goal, which they dubbed Topaz. Topaz was a program to take the scanned digital files from Search Inside the Book and repurpose them in a format suitable for the Kindle. Amazon offered this as an option to publishers, arguing that it would help them decrease
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy · 12 Apr 2011 · 666pp · 181,495 words
such as Startup in about forty-two minutes, faster than they expected. Then they ran optical character recognition (OCR) software on the images and began searching inside the book. Page would open the book to a random page and say, “This word—can you find it?” Mayer would do a search to see if
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a shock in October 2003, when it learned it was not the only company doing a massive book-scanning project. That was the day Amazon.com introduced its “Search Inside the Book” feature. Amazon head Jeff Bezos had ordered the project to see if searching inside books would increase sales. (It did, by about 9
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, “The Great Library of Amazonia,” Wired, December 2003. 355 “I think it’s an important part” Brin gave me the quote for my column about Search Inside the Book, “Welcome to History 2.0,” Newsweek, November 10, 2003. 356 “innocent arrogance” John Heilemann, “Googlephobia,” New York, December 5, 2005. 357 Page was rhapsodic Page
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr · 9 Feb 2021 · 302pp · 100,493 words
lead one of the company’s smallest ventures, if not the smallest. At that time, the Amazon digital media business consisted of our newly launched Search Inside the Book feature plus the e-books team (roughly five people), all buried deep in Steve’s organization and generating a few million dollars in annual revenue
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the capability for customers to preview several pages of a book they were interested in—first called Look Inside the Book and then improved to Search Inside the Book. We had worked with publishers to manually digitize their books, so we understood the process. And so we launched Kindle, with its connected e-bookstore
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millions of customers. In 2002, that would have been a reasonably large but very doable project for Amazon. That pretty much describes, in fact, our Search Inside the Book capability. For most companies, however, such a project would have been cost and time prohibitive. But it was clear that more and more companies would
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finance team’s tracking of growth and evolution of high bar for input-focused metrics multiple SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely) Scott, MacKenzie Search Inside the Book feature Self-Service Order Fulfillment (SSOF) Sequoia Capital sideloading Siegel, H. B. single-threaded leadership being Amazonian and flexibility of size Fulfillment by Amazon and
One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt · 27 Oct 2011 · 222pp · 54,506 words
all publishers or authors like the idea of letting people read some of the book before buying it. Even worse, two years later he added “Search Inside the Book,” allowing people to pick out only the topics they’re interested in without paying a cent. It’s a great research tool for college students
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris · 6 Mar 2007 · 233pp · 67,596 words
.com, greatly prefers to perform limited tests of new features on Amazon.com, rigorously quantifying user reaction before rolling them out. But the company’s “search inside the book” offering was impossible to test without applying it to a critical mass of books (Amazon.com started with 120,000). It was also expensive to
Natural language processing with Python
by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper · 15 Dec 2009 · 504pp · 89,238 words
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P97 -1023). 35. ● Design an algorithm to find the “statistically improbable phrases” of a document collection (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/search-inside/sipshelp.html). 36. ● Write a program to implement a brute-force algorithm for discovering word squares, a kind of n × n: crossword in which