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Self-sufficiency, satisfaction, seamlessness

In late October 2003, without much corporate fanfare, Amazon released a “search inside” feature that allows full-text searching of about one quarter of a million e-versions of print books. This is about as many titles as a physical bookstore has, and a great deal less than many libraries own. Amazon is the first commercial entity to offer full-text searching at no cost (although it requires searchers be registered Amazon customers). At bottom, the feature is meant to help Amazon sell more books, something Amazon is quite up-front about. But, the significance of Amazon’s full-text search feature is not so much about the cool technology behind the feature, or about content. The significance is about self-sufficiency, satisfaction and seamlessness. In other words, the “Aha!” factor is not about technology; it’s about what can be done with the technology. Stephan Levy of Newsweek wrote: “It’s a lightning bolt from the future. Some people literally broke out in tears as they punched in queries and unearthed obscure but relevant citations.”28

Predictably, this feature was met with negative and positive reactions. On the negative side, people worried that only big publishers would be able to participate, further alienating small and niche publishers, or that searchers would pirate copy, or that the information consumer would now use Amazon for research in lieu of libraries’ much larger collections. On the positive side, people heralded this move as a way to rejuvenate access to and use of out-of-print material, as a powerful adjunct to research, and as a new way to link readers with their interests. Karen Schneider, well-known among librarians, wrote on her blog, Free Range Librarian: “I heard repeated reference from presenters and keynoters [at the Internet Librarian conference] to the significance of Amazon’s new Search Inside the Book feature, confirming my own gut reaction that this is big, really big, in ways we don’t yet understand or appreciate.”29

Newsweek’s Levy captures one of the ways in which this is big: “The ability to record events was a transforming development for our entire species. But until very recently—until the Web—the vast collective documentary created by humans has always been limited because the works we created were so difficult to access.”30 Book titles can never capture the nature of the content in books, and even good subject cataloging is limited to providing broad brush strokes about content. But titles and subject headings do not help people differentiate among similar sounding books. And this is where full-text searching can expose useful and relevant content that is invisible using title and subject searches. As librarians know, the more specific the term, the more likely a full-text search will be successful. So, searching for “amazon” in Amazon returns almost 14,000 book titles and excerpts on the river, the company, female warriors and the children’s book Swallows and Amazons. Searching for “Boadicea” returns 434 titles, including Personal History by Katharine Graham of The Washington Post fame. She relates on page 15 that her mother was asked by the sculptor Rodin to pose for a statue of Boadicea. Who knew? “That’s why the advances of Google and Amazon are so profoundly important. They are harbingers of a new kind of history, where the world’s information is not only more plentiful and diverse, but astonishingly accessible.”31 Won’t it be nice when an advance in the library community is so well-covered and greeted with such warmth?

“[A] seamless customer experience across channels will often require internal enterprise priorities, processes and management responsibilities to be redesigned, which may be just as difficult to implement as the technology aspects.”32

The information consumer is ready.

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