undyingking: (Default)
undyingking ([personal profile] undyingking) wrote2006-06-23 11:18 am
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Things Amazon.com does better than Amazon.co.uk, part 47

These examples all come from John Crowley's Little, Big, but they have it enabled across quite a wide range of books.

Most common words

Statistically improbably phrases

Text stats including the essential words-per-dollar and words-per-ounce indices. From now on I shall by all my books according to these measures.

[identity profile] bateleur.livejournal.com 2006-06-23 11:16 am (UTC)(link)
I'm very surprised by the complexity stats - Crowley's relatively unreadable... are these more complex books the literary equivalent of dark matter or something ?!

[identity profile] undyingking.livejournal.com 2006-06-23 11:29 am (UTC)(link)
Mm, I haven't tried hunting out any more complex ones... but if you change the comparison to eg. 'book clubs / literature & fiction', the readability indices move up into the 60s%, suggesting that the measures find non-fiction books inherently less readable in some way.

[identity profile] vicarage.livejournal.com 2006-06-23 01:14 pm (UTC)(link)
I wondered why 80% of books are more readable. I didn't shilly-shally, but jumped to Finnegan's Wake to see what was harder than that, but sadly they've not enabled the feature there.

[identity profile] undyingking.livejournal.com 2006-06-23 01:36 pm (UTC)(link)
they've not enabled the feature there

Maybe it broke it.