Delicate Genius Blog

Man Amazon.com have been a bunch of busy bees of late. Three interesting bits for ya.

First, they’ve announced that they’ll be selling books by the page iTunes style. Basically, their intent is to sell chapters or pages from books independent of the entire book. Sounds like a good deal for technical books, or picture books maybe.

Secondly, they’re going to offer an upgrade to customer for paper based books. So, if you buy a book as well as getting it shipped you’ll be able to access an online version too.

I’ve never been able to read too much on a computer screen so I’m not sure this will appeal to me. The only value that having an electronic copy of a book has had to me is that it’s searchable. A problem which Amazon.com’s own SearchInside! feature, Google Print and The Open Content Alliance are solving for me for free :-). Although having technical reference material accessible on a screen might be a benefit.

Finally, and most interestingly, they introduced “Amazon Mechanical Turk: Artificial Artificial Intelligence“. Basically, it’s a service aimed at getting humans to do tasks which can’t be done by computer.

So, it goes like this – If a user of the Amazon.com API wants to implement a feature which requires data that can’t be determined by a computer (eg the contents of an image or analysis of a text or evaluating beauty or translating text etc), they implement the feature and specify a fee for how much they’re happy to pay for each request fulfilled. Requests are called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks).

Users can sign up to fulfil HITs and get paid accordingly. Amazon takes a cut of 10%.

Pretty fascinating innovation, I wonder if it’ll take off? Hundreds and thousands of micro-tasks = hundreds and thousands of micro-payments, sounds like a call centre or sweatshop to me but I’ll refrain from being negative about it for the time being.

So, if you’re interested in making a couple of bucks, I mean cents, I mean US$0.03 per HIT, have a look at the ones currently on offer here.

Mechanical Turk is explained in more detail on the Mechanical Turk site and in the FAQ.

The worst thing about all of this is, now more people know about The Turk, further reducing my “interesting quotient” at parties :-(

-dg