Reducing Your Book Buying To Statistically Ridiculous Triviality
from the how-many-words-per-dollar-is-that? dept
Earlier this year, Amazon.com got some press for revealing their "text stats" with "statistically improbably phrases," listing out phrases that tend to only appear in that particular book. There were other stats as well -- and all were about equally as useless. It appears that the Washington Post has just discovered these silly stats and has written up an amusing article noting some of the completely useless and trivial stats you can now compare different books over. They really seem to like the "words per dollar" feature, for instance. "But in its pure form, Text Stats is a triumph of trivialization.... Now you too can sound like a literary insider at Washington cocktail parties. You can throw around statistics and make clever conversation about the hard history books, the long-winded novels, even those thick, heavy, make-you-think philosophy tomes that contain really, really long words. And the beauty of it is, with Amazon's "Search Inside" Text Stats and other features, you won't even have to read them."Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
But can it do Type I Nested F-tests?
It might be fun to perform a principal components analysis (PCA) on a book, to find eigenvectors of words that describe a typical page. What if every page in a book is merely a linear combination of eigenvectors? It would probably work really well for Techdirt, with its predictable anti-recording-industry postings, free market dogma, and anti-dorpus rants.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
SIPs and search
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
how ironic
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: how ironic
[ link to this | view in chronology ]