If you walked into a bookstore, and all the books were shrink-wrapped shut, would you be inclined to spend much time shopping? Probably not. Yet Amazon operated with this handicap for its first eight years--customers couldn't actually see inside the books.
In 2003 Amazon enrolled the first 120,000 books in Search Inside, enabling buyers to view sample pages and search the complete text, providing millions more ways for buyers to stumble onto your book.
Previously, buyers could search only for words in book titles. With Search Inside, anyone searching for words contained somewhere in your book can find it, even without knowing the title or author name. For example, if a shopper searches Amazon for Eleanor Rigby, the top three results are books whose titles contain Eleanor Rigby. Then come another 568 books that mention Eleanor Rigby on at least one page.
Like nearly every Amazon innovation, Search Inside was resisted by many publishers, who insisted it would hurt book sales. Why, they argued, would anyone buy a book--especially cookbooks, travel guides, or other references--if they could get the pages they wanted free? But after Amazon reported average sales boosts of 9 percent for titles enrolled in Search Inside, most publishers signed up.
Amazon uses Search Inside to sell books just like Baskin-Robbins sells ice cream: by giving people a sample right when they're in a position to buy, says Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos:
If you went to the middle of Central Park on a hot day and let people sample your ice cream, they might come back later [to your store] and buy some. But if you let them sample ice cream right next to the cash register--inside the Baskin-Robbins--you're definitely going to increase sales. So the idea is to literally let people look inside the book and find what they're looking for.
Bezos concedes Search Inside doesn't convert everyone into a buyer. Many people use it as a research tool without paying, but were probably not likely buyers anyway.
Amazon builds safeguards into Search Inside to prevent customers from reading large portions of a book without buying it. Users must register with a credit card first, and can view no more than 20 percent of any particular book. The text displayed on the screen is a low-resolution image, and it can't be copied into a word processor.
Search Inside also provides a unique marketing opportunity for crafty writers able to hook readers with their first sentence. Amazon displays your initial sentence hyperlinked, so interested readers can click straight through to your whole introduction. If your book has a long first sentence, only its first 125 characters are displayed on the detail page, followed by an ellipsis.
To enroll in Search Inside, go to:
#www.Amazon.com/publishers#
Then click the link for Search Inside. The publisher must initiate participation; a distributor can't enroll your book.