Entrepreneurship

Amazon Text Stats

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ October 24, 2005 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Have you seen this?

Readability statistics for books included in their Search Inside the Book program (where authors/publishers send Amazon a book to be scanned, after which every darn word can be searched for and sample pages perused). Plus a concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. And a statistically improbable phrases feature helpfully described by Amazon in a pop-up window:

“Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or ‘SIPs’, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.”

It’s old news, having been released back in April, but it occurred to me that a “smartest books” list would be really fun. I put in the last few books I’ve read for pleasure, and it turns out I’m a solid high school reader (Neal Stephenson) and/or read books so obscure that they don’t get ranked (lke Six Degrees, a book about social networks).

Not that I’m interested in it for more than the academics of it, but I bet a smartest books list would create a lot of Amazon referral sales…