Statistically Improbable Phrases and Other Fun With Words
Amazon has added some nifty new features to their book pages with little apparent fanfare. They include (with links to an example for Stephen King’s The Wolves of Calla):
- Statistically improbable phrases - “the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books”.
- Books on related topics - Appears to use the aforementioned SIPs to find other books with similar improbably phrases.
- Concordance - Uses a very Flickr or 43 Things-type interface to display the top 100 words in the book.
- Text stats - Mostly useless statistics about the book. Words per sentence is the most interesting one. See if you can beat Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, which comes in at 793 words per sentence.
