Does The Look-Inside-the-Book Feature Hurt Authors?

Here’s an image: Gutenberg is fiddling with his typefaces, while nearby stands a monk, muttering, “Horrors! It’ll put us all out of work! We won’t be able to charge as much for our illuminated manuscripts!”

Okay, so that didn’t happen. But it’s true that every new technology changes the way we (and others) look at our work product, and none of these changes have yet put writers out of business. I’d argue that Amazon’s search feature is one that, au contraire, actually helps us.

We all know the dreaded assumed advantages for readers, who can now use a computer to “thumb through” books, take them off their virtual shelves and look inside. (Gee, couldn’t do that in a real bookstore, now, could they?) Those who have the patience – and the paper – may even be able to, with time and through an unwieldy process, print out an entire tome of our work and read our books without paying us a penny for the privilege.

This can happen. This does happen. And the few writers whose work is directly affected (cookbook, travel, and test writers) have good reason for an appeal in their own limited cases. But for the rest of us, the program is worth a second look.

What’s in it for most writers? Plenty. “In five minutes, I was able to find three books that talked about findings first listed in two of my own published scientific papers, yet these books did not cite me, or anyone else, as the source of that information,” says an anonymous contributor to one Internet list. “My lawyer is currently preparing three letters.”

An extreme case? Hardly: the NWU joined the Author’s Guild and the ASJA this spring in obtaining a settlement pertaining to stolen work product. Thank you, Amazon: it’s nice to have an ongoing way for us all to monitor the possibility of intellectual property theft. And let’s take it a step further: the same students that so horrify those who fear that no textbooks will ever be sold again are now well aware of professors’ ability to check for plagiarism on Amazon. Paper mills, too: beware. Nothing is too obscure for Search Inside the Book to find. 

Novelist Michelle Buckman sees an even more direct advantage for writers. “With the ‘inside the book’ feature,” she says, “writers can now use Amazon's search engine to search on agents and/or editors’ names that might appear in acknowledgments, which gives them immediate samples of what an editor has worked on.” A nice trick that, once upon a time, could take weeks to accomplish.

Let’s talk about research, a subject near if not dear to every writer’s heart. “I went onto Amazon (before) to find books about Singular Value Decompositions,” says executive Matthew Gertner. “I wasn’t particularly surprised when it returned zero results, since anyone who puts the term ‘Singular Value Decomposition’ in their book’s title obviously doesn’t know much about marketing. I don’t actually give a damn if the term is in the title or not; I just want to know if the book talks about this technique. I tried the search again today and got nearly 5,000 results, with the capability to actually look and see if the reference is useful to me.”

Search is one of the most powerful tools available to us today. I want potential readers to check out my books on virtual shelves in the same way I want them looking through them in a bookshop or library. As more and more intellectual discourse happens online, digging in our heels and resisting new technologies seems counterproductive.

There’s a problem, I think, when an author is concerned about people actually reading their book. So… please do read on!