[CPSLibraries] Better Living Through Amazon.com

[Timothy G. Toner]

A teacher sent his students in with an assignment to bring to class a
non-fiction title dealing with an assigned ethnic group (and no
reference--essentially the mother of all 'bird units').  I've been slowly
amassing a collection to support this quirky project, but every year, they
manage to stump me.  This year, a student came in with Pashtun.  Being a
responsible librarian, I led him to the OPAC and we typed in Pashtun. 
Nada, naturally.  Being a know-it-all, I told him who the Pashtun were,
and we then searched Afghanistan, which resulted in a number of hits.  We
tracked down two of them, one of which appealed to the student.  It was
Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, a travelogue of his journey across
Afghanistan in the wake of the fall of the Taliban.  The student did what
students always do, which was to fan through the book, looking for the
section CLEARLY marked 'Pashtun'.  Alas, this book didn't even have an
index.  The student looked at me, seemingly challenging my know-it-all
status.  How did I KNOW that he'd talk about the Pashtun?  I then rolled
the dice, and called up Amazon.com.

In a bid to sell you books that you actually NEED, Amazon has scanned in a
great number of their books, and they're full-text searchable.  In this
case, The Places in Between WAS one of these books.  I clicked on the
Search Inside feature, and typed Pashtun.  It grinded out a passable index
to that specific term, and the student jotted down the occurences on a
separate sheet of paper.  

The utility of this feature should be obvious for any number of titles
that come to you without an index.  Google Book Search does the same to a
much larger section of books, though you need a gmail account to access
certain titles, and they tend to be older.  Amazon also has various
statistics attached to these 'search inside' titles, such as The
Fleisch-Kincaid Scale, a kinda-sorta Lexile and word per dollar, which is
simply word count divided by price.  As you can tell:

http://www.amazon.com/Places-Between-Rory-Stewart/dp/sitb-next/0156031566/ref=sbx_txt/105-9115217-7661201#textstats

this book is QUITE a value.

FYI,

tt

---
"The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of
the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, 'Do this and
he doeth it'; but I am obliged to say: 'This is the reason why you ought
to do that' and then he [the American soldier] does it." -- Baron Von
Steuben, in a letter to an old Prussian friend