Amazon's Library of Babel

Speaking Volumes

"Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes and babblings."

Some years after Borges published the short fictional piece, The Library of Babel, he appended a footnote: "Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is pointless: strictly speaking, all that is required is a single volume, of the common size, printed in nine-or-ten-point type, that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages."

The 'single volume' was literally unimaginable in the 1940s, and Borges explained why: "...Each apparent page would open into other similar pages; the inconceivable middle page would have no 'back'." It's a pretty decent description of HTML pages and hyperlinks.

Some six decades later, in the age of the Internet, Amazon (www.amazon.com) has perhaps unwittingly come up with a prototype of the Library of Babel. Instead of Borges' ringing, loaded phrase, however, their 'library' masquerades as a newly introduced feature on the website called 'Search Inside the Book'.

Through the last ten days, the worlds of publishing and technology have been buzzing with the implications that this simple search button could unleash.

Until the backroom boys at Amazon came up with this idea, even the best-stocked Internet books website had its limitations.

Whether it was Amazon or Barnes & Noble or, closer to home, First and Second, most websites were fairly accurate when it came to locating a book the reader knew she wanted; they were bad at pointing the reader in the direction of books she didn't know she wanted to read.

Any bricks-and-mortar bookstore blessed with an intelligent human agent did a better job of pulling out volumes obscure or new tailored to the particular tastes of a customer.

Amazon has been better at defining what the new service isn't rather than what it is. According to spokespeople for the website, 'Search Inside the Book' isn't intended to be a browsing service so much as a tool for discovery.

Customers aren't expected to use the new search button in order to eliminate books from their shopping list, but rather to lead them into making new purchases.

But perhaps the most questionable statement made by Amazon is their declaration that they haven't created an electronic library so much as a more accurate database.

I spent most of last week road-testing the new service. The initial glitches were big: Amazon has replaced its old search button, which allowed you to search for a book by title, keyword, author's or publisher's name and ISBN number, with the new model.

As a result, tightly focused searches are less effective and suffer from the same problem as general Internet searches: they throw up way too much data.

If you're searching for books by John Smith, or by an author with an equally ubiquitous name, for example, it's a nightmare.

Not only does the new search model offer you books by John Smith, it will also come up with books about characters called John Smith, books that refer to John Smith in the footnotes. Instant information overload, in other words.

But if you're searching for a phrase such as 'unbearable lightness', the utility of 'Search Inside the Book' is blinding.

Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being is, usefully, flagged first; then come books with similar titles; then come books that refer to Kundera; then come random references that use the phrase.

The phrase 'arranged marriage' offers more than 26,000 matches, with Chitra B Divakaruni's syrupy confections leading the way.

'Dean Mahomet' throws up about 560 references to the first Indian to write a travelogue in English, some of them hard-to-find books of great interest to the serious scholar.

You cannot play around with this service for even half-an-hour without realising that Amazon has, yet again, introduced a complete paradigm shift.

It has a downside: several authors have protested at the inclusion of their books on the service, saying that this only makes it easier for pirates (and browsing customers) to fish out what they want from the books and walk away without paying for the book itself.

High on the list of those impacted adversely are travel guide writers, cookbook authors and the like.

Amazon, in order to put their new search engine together, has tied up with over 190 publishers "" it would be impossible for them to deal directly with authors, given the magnitude of what they're trying to do.

But the website has attempted to fix early glitches. Though it refuses to confirm that such a use of the service was possible, I know that it was perfectly possible to use the search findings to print out specific pages from specific books, or even to save those particular pages on your computer as a word file.

Theoretically, for someone who has time to waste, you could print out or download an entire book from the Amazon website without paying a dime for the service. Given that scenario, authors had a right to complain.

The website won't confirm that it's tweaked its service, but users today will discover that their options are limited to reading pages online.

You can no longer print a page or save it by right-clicking; the truly desperate can still, of course, take a screenshot (a photograph of the actual computer screen showing the page you're reading), but that is not an economical option for serious pirates.

Right now, Amazon's Library of Babel is not complete, though it is hugely comprehensive; it throws up a fair amount of rubbish alongside occasional pearls.

For me and an entire world of readers, though, it's fast becoming an addiction. Just a small example: unable to locate my Borges volumes, I tried searching for the Borges quote given above on standard quotation and reference sites as well as on Amazon.

The quotation sites came up with many Borges quotes, but not the one I wanted; Amazon produced exactly what I needed first shot.

Roli's Silver Anniversary: Indian publishers are beginning to realise that they have vast, untapped resources tucked away in their own offices.

Oxford University Press has begun mining its files "" Sridhar Balan came up with a wonderful article recently on the correspondence between Jim Corbett and the publishing firm "" to good effect. Roli Books is celebrating its 25th year in publishing by offering us goodies from its database.

An exhibition of "memorabilia from [the] archives" opens in Delhi this week, and a coffee table book celebrating '150 years of photography' focuses on The Unforgettable Maharajas. Nice going.

nilroy@lycos.com