Amazon Pitches F***ing Insane New Book Features to Wall Street
from the and-so-it-goes... dept
theodp writes “In Tuesday’s Q1 2005 Earnings Conference Call, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak boasted to Wall Street analysts that Amazon was now displaying Statistically improbable phrases (SIPs) on the top of product detail pages. So now when you check out a book like Tommyland, Amazon lets you know right upfront that Rocker Tommy Lee’s SIPs include: porno shoot, rock sh*t, f***ing insane, f***ing rock, and even provides you with a f***ing insane link to other books. Szkutak also explained how to use the Amazon-provided Flesch-Kincaid Index to determine who a book is appropriate for, which in the case of Tommyland includes seventh graders (the same as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man).” This is more amusing than anything else, and is to be expected of a newly launched service like this. Still, you have to wonder if some people are going to freak out about it. Chances are, Amazon will add in some sort of filter for certain words, and offer it like Google’s so-called “Safe Search”. As for the Flesch-Kincaid Index, just about everyone knows that’s not the most reliable system to use, so it hardly seems fair to blame Amazon for using it.
