Amazon.com has added additional features to how The Wages of Wins is displayed on their website. You can now see a blown-up picture of the front cover (not sure why you would want to, but you can). You can also see that our book is has been copyrighted (again, not sure why this is important to potential buyers, but its there to be seen). Furthermore, once can now see a copy of the book’s Index, which is important for other researchers to know when they look to see if we mentioned their work or not.
Perhaps more importantly, you can see now see a copy of the Table of Contents, although we provide a more detailed version at our website. You can also now read all of Games With Numbers, the first chapter of our book.
All this is neat, but there is one feature that truly stands out. That feature is called Surprise Me! If you click on this link you are apparently taken to a random point in The Wages of Wins. So this feature allows you to read two or three pages located somewhere in the book. If you click again, you are taken to a different place in the book for another two or three pages.
Surprise Me! causes me to ask two questions:
First, can you read the entire book via this feature?
Second, would the book make more sense if you didn’t read it in the order it is written?
— DJ
Wages of Wins Journal 
Kevin
July 21, 2006
I’m not positive, but I believe the entire book can be read using the “search within the book” feature. If you have the patience, you can read the first three pages, choose a phrase on the third page, search for that, select that page, and then the feature gives you access to the following three pages, and you can continue, seemingly forever. I tried this both at the beginning of the book and from pages 94-109, and both times I only stopped because it was too much of a pain. Since you can, I assume, get the whole book using the search feature, it would seem the random selections would be from the entire book as well.
Jim A
July 21, 2006
I believe Amazon puts limits on the number of pages you can view on a per-day basis, but as I recall it’s still fairly generous. Google Book Search has similar functionality, though they don’t have Wages of Wins available yet.
Also, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML can download the images that make up individual pages of books and print them out, though it’s probably difficult to do this in an automated fashion.
Some publishers have a problem with this feature, but to me it’s no different from going to the public library and using the copy machine. I wouldn’t read or copy an entire book this way, but I might do it for a few pages or chapter of a book that I wouldn’t otherwise purchase.
Me
July 22, 2006
I don’t know if the “Surprise me” feature has cost you sales, but it has gained you one: Mine. I am not an NBA fan, the reading about the book,it came across as highly NBA slanted, so I would probably have given it a miss if I hadn’t read a couple of pages on Amazon and liked them.