Amazon word games
Amazon continues to roll out neat little features based on analysis of book texts.
When you view a page for a particular book on Amazon, if you roll the cursor over the image of the book, you get that little window that lets you search the text. It
But now they have two new features, called "concordance" and "text stats".
Concordance shows you the top 100 most frequently used words in a book (after ones like "and" or "the"). The more often a word appears, the larget its font is on the page. If you move the cursor over it, it shows you how many times that word appeared. If you click on it, you can see each occurance in the book.
Text stats is a little more interesting. It has four categories of information: Readability, Complexity, Number of, and Fun Stats.
The Readability section gives you three different measures for how readable a book is, i.e. what level of education is generally required to comfortably read that book.
Complexity tells you the number of complex words (defined as three syllables or more), average syllables per word, and average words per sentence.
Number of gives you basic data like the number of characters, words and sentences in the book.
And Fun Stats tell you how many words you get per dollar or ounce of that edition.
All this could be useful in determining whether a certain book is suitable for a younger reader, like that nephew who lives across the country whose birthday is coming up.
It's also just sort of fun to compare books. Like Sister Alice versus Ideas.
Take Ideas. A hundred pages into this thing and my main impression was that it read much like a college textbook. Sure enough, according to Amazon, the book as a Flesch Index readibility level of 31.1, right near the range (0-30) at which a college degree is required to understand the text.
Furthermore, 21 percent of the text consists of complex words. There are 24.7 words per sentence, and nearly 5,300 sentences.
On the other hand, Sister Alice has a Flesch Index of 65.1 and has a complex words content of 11 percent. In contrast to Ideas, it has more than 8,800 sentences despite containing about 25 percent fewer words (105,000 versus 130,000).
Now obviously the two books can't really be compared since one is a book about big ideas like democracy (four syllables right there) and capitalism (another four) while one is a mass market sci-fi novel, albeit one that is more thoughtful than most.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this stuff is actually useful in helping people to make book buying decisions, but it is a pretty good way to waste some time and linger on the Amazon site.
When you view a page for a particular book on Amazon, if you roll the cursor over the image of the book, you get that little window that lets you search the text. It
But now they have two new features, called "concordance" and "text stats".
Concordance shows you the top 100 most frequently used words in a book (after ones like "and" or "the"). The more often a word appears, the larget its font is on the page. If you move the cursor over it, it shows you how many times that word appeared. If you click on it, you can see each occurance in the book.
Text stats is a little more interesting. It has four categories of information: Readability, Complexity, Number of, and Fun Stats.
The Readability section gives you three different measures for how readable a book is, i.e. what level of education is generally required to comfortably read that book.
Complexity tells you the number of complex words (defined as three syllables or more), average syllables per word, and average words per sentence.
Number of gives you basic data like the number of characters, words and sentences in the book.
And Fun Stats tell you how many words you get per dollar or ounce of that edition.
All this could be useful in determining whether a certain book is suitable for a younger reader, like that nephew who lives across the country whose birthday is coming up.
It's also just sort of fun to compare books. Like Sister Alice versus Ideas.
Take Ideas. A hundred pages into this thing and my main impression was that it read much like a college textbook. Sure enough, according to Amazon, the book as a Flesch Index readibility level of 31.1, right near the range (0-30) at which a college degree is required to understand the text.
Furthermore, 21 percent of the text consists of complex words. There are 24.7 words per sentence, and nearly 5,300 sentences.
On the other hand, Sister Alice has a Flesch Index of 65.1 and has a complex words content of 11 percent. In contrast to Ideas, it has more than 8,800 sentences despite containing about 25 percent fewer words (105,000 versus 130,000).
Now obviously the two books can't really be compared since one is a book about big ideas like democracy (four syllables right there) and capitalism (another four) while one is a mass market sci-fi novel, albeit one that is more thoughtful than most.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this stuff is actually useful in helping people to make book buying decisions, but it is a pretty good way to waste some time and linger on the Amazon site.
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