Okay, I know a lot of people were upset by Amazon's new search inside the book feature for what I gather were IP related issues. But I've come up with my own reason for not liking it.

Is it just me, or has it made the site pretty much useless?

Let's say I'm interested in a book about, oh, I don't know, Zeppelins. Now obviously it's no use searching for "Zeppelin" because that's just going to bring up a couple thousand books about Led Zeppelin. Biographies of band members, autobiographies of band members, alternate, unauthorized biographies of band members, reminiscences of screwing Jimmy Page in a drug-stoked orgy in 1971, books about how to play like Zeppelin, books about what the hell Plant's saying in all those songs and why he's saying it, books about how Zeppelin's lyrics are the direct word of God and changed the author's life, on and on and on. (Jesus, fucking boomers - they were just a band. They weren't profound, they were wasted. It's not the same.)

But I digress. Okay, that's not really Amazon's fault. But typing "dirigible" into Amazon brings up 1118 books. And not one on the first page of listings has fuck all to do with dirigibles. It includes The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Stephen King's On Writing, Ender's Game (!!) The World Almanac for Kids and even Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot because he puts "see also dirigible" in the INDEX as a fat joke.

Sure you can dig around in there and eventually find some actual books about dirigibles (hint - look for the ones that are out of print, limited availability) but what a huge pain in the ass. 1118 entries!

Mind you, it's not that I really need a book about dirigibles at this point. It's just easier to look that up than actually hammer out the part of my zeppelin story that's troubling me at the moment. And even here, it's not like I don't know what happens. It's just that I've got a lot of transitional material to get in to shift my characters from what they were doing in the front half of the story to what they're doing in the back half and I'm trying to figure out how to keep it from dragging the story to a halt and blowing my word count out of all proportion. (If this was a novel, no problem, I'd be writing right now instead of wasting time telling people why I'm not.)

As Bickham would describe it, this is a sequel made overlong by a lot of expository material explaining the ramifications of my hero's decision making process and a lengthy transition covering the sigificant change between the last scene and the next one. Without some explanation, you're left wondering why the reaction to what's happened before is to go off and do this.

I'm going to have to experiment. What do people think of just dropping readers into the new scene and expecting them to figure out the why as they go?