analyzing the link structures that bind all those pages together,
Google is able to actually tease out machine-generated
conclusions about the relative relevance of different pages to
different queries. None of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but
Google can digest it for us and excrete the steaming nuggets of
goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it is today.

8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To
round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are
more like paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of
retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with a
good several times before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed
around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review,
and so forth, seven times, on average, before they're ready to
buy.

There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor.
Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of
the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking
at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not
having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king
left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).
Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred
thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten
thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for
ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would
be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if
one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my