A new feature offered by online bookseller Amazon.com is a browser's dream. But will it help the Seattle company sell more books?
Type a word or phrase into Amazon's free "search inside the books" box, and its computers will return with a list of up to 120,000 books that contain that word or phrase somewhere in their text. You can view the relevant excerpts within each volume, as well as several full pages that precede or follow it. With publishers' permission, Amazon has scanned and indexed 33-million pages of text so far.
In theory, the e-merchant has now matched one of the enduring pleasures of visiting a brick-and-mortar book store, the opportunity to roam the aisles and thumb through the offerings. But the online results range from the useful to the absurd.
A search for Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer's name, for example, yields four books. When the Game is on the Line recalls how NFL officials, fearing that Glazer's presence would chill voters, suggested he leave town during a mid-1990s referendum on taxpayer financing for Raymond James Stadium. (He did.)
Glazer's name also pops up in The Dog Lover's Companion to Florida. His Palm Beach home is listed among several that readers and their pooches can glance at while touring Ocean Boulevard.
Whether such information will induce customers to buy more books from Amazon, or perhaps fewer, is unclear.
Pine Island writer Randy Wayne White had a mixed reaction to the service, which is free but requires the user to set up an Amazon account and provide a credit card number.
"That is going to be an extraordinarily useful research tool, as a writer," said White, whose next novel, Tampa Burns, is due out in April. "Now, as a bookseller, I don't know what the advantage might be. It may well spare people from buying the book. I'm relieved I don't write reference books."
Here's how Amazon pitches the new service to publishers and authors on its Web site: "With "search inside the book,' customers can also browse sample pages and do additional searches inside a particular book to confirm that the title is just what they're looking for. All of this helps publishers and authors like you sell more books."
At the very least, the new feature will cement Amazon's reputation as a company on the cutting edge of merchandising technology.
In the meantime, it will serve as a tool for snoops, recipe hunters and stock investors anxious for that elusive piece of data few others can find, as demonstrated by some more "search inside the book" queries on names prominent in the Tampa Bay area.
A search on the name "Joe Redner" yields just one hit. The book Shakespeare After Mass Media lists the Tampa strip club owner and perennial political candidate as the producer of a gory film called Titus Adronicus.
Tampa Bay Devil Rays owner Vince Naimoli is mentioned in eight books, all sports-related. In The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream, reporter Steve Fainaru quotes sources who say the Devil Rays paid a $500,000 kickback to an agent for arranging to deliver a Cuban pitcher named Rolando Arrojo. Rays general manager Chuck LaMar told Fainaru the story was false. Ballparks: Then & Now ridicules Naimoli for "ludicrously" dubbing Tropicana Field "the Ballpark of the 20th Century."
Film star Angela Bassett, who grew up in St. Petersburg, is mentioned in 155 books scanned by Amazon. Most are movie encyclopedias or other film-related books.
Bassett also shows up in Stretch Your Wings: Famous Black Quotations for the Young.
"When I was growing up in Florida, I had a very limited picture of the possibilities. I didn't know anybody who was an actor," Bassett says. "I've learned that the world is bigger than the south side of St. Petersburg."
