Library+News

=Amazon Upgrade: a really useful idea that nobody has heard of=

For Andrew Brown, 'Upgrade' almost offers readers the best of all possible worlds
One of the best-hidden reading devices on the net is Amazon's "Upgrade", which has been going in one form or another since 2005 without anyone taking any notice of it - which is odd, because it almost offers readers the best of all possible worlds. Printed books and electronic texts are good for different things. Printed books are good for reading; electronic works for searching and annotating. You never run out of room in the margins on an ebook, whereas the books that I really love look as if they have been the victim of a methedrine-crazed medieval monk. Equally, there is no index in a printed book that will find the passage you know is in there somewhere as a parenthesis in a discussion of something entirely unconnected, which will be indexed, but not at all helpfully. One answer to this problem is to be the Dalai Lama, who through long years of training has the kind of memory that can remember where and in which library the scroll he wants is stored. But it's easier to use Amazon Upgrade. However, reading books on screen is pretty horrible, in every way that I have tried it. Nothing really matches up to good type on good paper, and it is most unlikely that a purely electronic text has been designed in the way that a book can be, so that every page pleases the eye; even when it could be possible to do so by using formats such as PDF. I spend almost all my working days reading on screen, and the relief that even a well-designed newspaper gives to the eyes is wonderful. So it was a shock, when ordering a couple of really obscure books from [|Amazon.com] last week (one was about game theory in the Old Testament, and the other was stranger still) to be offered for a few dollars more a chance to get access to an electronic version of the text as well. Though this was sold as a chance to start reading immediately, without waiting for the courier to arrive, that doesn't seem to be what would be generally useful about it. Nothing beats printed paper as a way to discover and absorb what is in a book. But nothing beats a screen as the way to find it again later, and this is what the Amazon service offers. I don't suppose it can be terribly popular; otherwise one would have heard more of it. Even before the collapse of the exchange rate, $5.50 is quite a lot of money to pay for the chance to index a book that may have contained nothing worth remembering in the first place; and it is only really writers and scholars who need to be able to check their references properly. If you don't want to pay anything at all, there is the rival service from [|Google] Books, which I have been using a lot in the past weeks to search books that I already own and have in my shelves; in some cases books that I have open in front of me as I type, but where I just can't find the passage that I know has to be there. But the Google Books snippet view is really tiny. For obvious reasons to do with copyright and theft it shows only a couple of lines around the search term and these are very often not the lines that contain the thing you want to reference. The Amazon Upgrade searches seem more generous and much more likely to apply to books in print and on sale, whereas Google's great strength is in works that are out of copyright (and thus unlikely to be editions that you actually own). The interesting thing about these services is that they reverse the process that everyone expected to happen, which would have made the electronic text primary and the printed book a secondary, temporary instantiation of it. People have been predicting for years that bookshops would gain print-on-demand facilities, so that the book you wanted would magically appear when you ordered it. But apart from the technical aspects, I don't see who gains from printing on demand except people who are trying to cut down on warehousing costs - oh, and Amazon, which is trying to monopolise the market. But the availability of full-text indexing of any book sold really does add something for any serious reader of non-fiction, and if the price were to come down a bit would, I think, be more celebrated as one of the few really good ideas of the past five years. [|thewormbook.com/helmintholog]
 * [[image:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/10/01/andrewbrownbyline.jpg width="60" height="60" caption="Andrew Brown" link="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/andrewbrown"]]
 * ** [|Andrew Brown]
 * [|The Guardian,] Thursday 15 January 2009
 * [|Article history]