According to the Washington Post, Amazon has a new program called Text Stats.  This is one of the programs that you sit back and wonder why anyone ever thought it was needed.  It’s part of the "Search Inside" program.  The Post describes it as this:

It can un-complicate comedies, trivialize tragedies, diminish legitimate discourse and completely humiliate the humanities.

Yeah, that’s clear.  This part is better:

Through Text Stats you can know such arcane things as the SIPs, or Statistically Improbable Phrases, that appear in a book.  The strange pairing of ‘reindeer socks,’ for instance, shows up four times in Eric Jerome Dickey’s ‘Naughty or Nice.’  Text stats will also tell you the number of characters (letters, not protagonists) in a book and the relative ‘complexity’ of the words.

Why is this needed, you ask?  I have absolutely no idea.  The fact Linton Weeks, the author of the article, took the time to look up the phrase "reindeer socks" is the bigger mystery.

The one really cool feature is Fun Stats which tells you how many words you get per dollar paid for the book.  So, when trying to decide which of two books to buy, you can now figure out which gives you the better word per penny average.  And, really, isn’t that how we all choose our books?

The article sums up my feelings with this:

Text Stats is a triumph of trivialization.  By squeezing all the life and loveliness out of poetry and prose, the computer succeeds in numbing with numbers.  It’s the total dissembling of truth, beauty and the mysterious meaning of words.

Then there’s how silly it seems….

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