The amazing Amazon "concordance" tool

This post returns us, dear readers, to uber-nerdy Librarian Land ... but I think you'll agree that this tool is pretty cool.

The term concordance usually refers to an alphabetical list of all of the words in a book, noting the locations where each word occurs (Shakespeare and the Bible have lots of concordances). New-school concordances have been cropping up online as tools to visually track the frequency of words by size: the bigger a word is, the more often it's used.

Now Amazon.com has gotten into the game -- here's an example: the concordance for High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (my favorite book, which I've now read seven times). You can even click on a word to see the sentence it came from in the book.

Why is this so cool? It lets the book speak for itself. It answers the pivotal "what's this book about?" question without any human intervention (except the programmer geniuses at Amazon). Maybe I'm a weird librarian for wanting to remove the human subject analysis, but I'd much rather let a book use its own words.