Silly names

Those oft-quoted Amazon sales rankings don’t really tell you much. They just give a snapshot of how a book is selling at a particular moment. TitleZ can track how a book’s ranking moves over time. There’s some debate about how much those rankings really tell you, but this is a fun toy nonetheless. (via)

Amazon has introduced a new feature that promises to be more useful than the Statistically Improbable Phrases feature that launched a few months ago. The “SIP” feature finds distinctive phrases inside books and then linked users to other books that contained those same distinctive phrases. For example, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World contains five instances of the distinctive phrase “deer poaching,” which Amazon tells us also appears in several other books, including Deer and Deer Hunting Book 2: Strategies and Tactics for the Advanced Hunter. Amusing, but not terribly useful. Amazon’s new feature, Capitalized Phrases” or “CAPs,” links books by proper names and places, so by clicking on “King Lear” from among the CAPs for Will in the World, you get a list of books that mention “King Lear.” This seems like a potentially very useful research tool – especially if Amazon decides not to limit the results to twenty or so books as they are currently doing. These “phrases” features by Amazon also represent a foray into the relatively new Internet phenomenon of tagging, which sites like del.icio.us use to categorize Web sites. Since the process is external – in the case of del.icio.us, the tags are applied by users – and has a human element to it, sites that employ tagging have the potential to be “smarter” than those that rely on old-fashioned search engines. It will be interesting to see if Amazon begins to allow user submitted tags in addition to its Search Inside a Book data to create a deep and highly intuitive way of organizing its massive inventory.

Any John Keegan fans out there? Here’s a review of his latest book Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda from the New Zealand Herald. I’m looking forward to reading this one.The Brits have something called the WHSmith Book Award, which is basically a “people’s choice” award for books. If you are so inclined, you can vote now. Some interesting nominations include Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in the adult fiction category, former professional wrestler/current professional novelist Mick Foley‘s Tietam Brown in the debut novel category, and LA Weekly contributor Geoff Dyer‘s book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It in the travel category. I wonder how something like this would go over in the States.