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I came across a thread in AskVille that claims we can get the word count of books on Amazon which have the "Look Inside" label.

Yet no matter how I search, I couldn't find the "Text Stats" link.

Did Amazon removed this feature?

Are there other web applications that give the "word count" of a book?

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The thread you refer to is 76 months old as of today (3/19/2014), dating that post to 2007.

It seems that the text stats feature was removed at some time during 2012.

Curiously, Amazon's help page still mentions the text stats feature.

Hovering over the cover of *some** books with the "Look Inside" feature enabled will bring up a popup that offers some links. The "Text Stats" used to be here.

Unfortunately, this feature no longer seems to be available anywhere on the site.

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*The author/publisher must opt-in for the search inside feature to be enabled.

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  • What alternatives are there besides Amazon? I've heard that GoogleBooks insanely OCRed almost all available books on Earth, but "text stats" can't seem to be found there as well.... – Pacerier Mar 19 '14 at 14:34
  • I haven't found anything comparable yet. – phantom42 Mar 19 '14 at 14:58
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For most books, you should be able to simply Google "Word count [book title]" It usually comes up for me depending on the popularity of the title.

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I found a similar thread that gave an old URL that still works.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0060530626/ref=sbx_txt/002-2018152-0260852?_encoding=UTF8#textstats

I found that if you replace the product ID in the url you can still access the "text stats" page. I only tried it on two books but it worked on both so I thought I'd share.

In the above URL, replace the 0060530626 with the product id of the book your are looking for. To do this, find the book you want on amazon. Here's an example of one on amazon: www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/dp/0671212095/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417307816&sr=8-1

The ID here is the number after /dp/. So if I replace the id in the first url with the id of the book I want, I can see the word count of that book! :)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0671212095/ref=sbx_txt/002-2018152-0260852?_encoding=UTF8#textstats

Not sure how long this trick will work, but someone might find it useful.

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  • Hmm, it doesn't seem to work. For example, I tried itusing dp=0439139600 and dp=0470267585 but for both pages, the "text stats" doesn't appear..... – Pacerier Dec 1 '14 at 21:56

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