Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Tom Killalea

Janna Hamaker

Joshua M Goodspeed

Eugene Kalenkovich

Abhishek Patnia

Adam J Iser

Alla Taborisskaya

Emily Margaret Anderson

Christopher F Weight

Francis J Kane, Jr

Daniel Benjamin Rausch

Karthik Gopal Anbalagan

Bruno A Posokhow

Brent Russell Smith

Preetha Chatterjee

Thomas F Dimson

Zaur Kambarov

Valeria A Pakhomova

Luis Felipe Cabrera

Ryan Justin Snodgrass

Sean Michael Scott

Kevin M Anderson

Amit D Agarwal

James Connelly Petts

Aaron James Dykstra

Llewellyn James Mason

Hanning Zhou

Andrew Douglas Birkett

Laura Ellen Grit

Peter A Larsen

Daniel Leng

Todd H Sullivan

Jeffrey L Belle

Llewllyn J Mason

Gregory Gridin

Vaibhav Shankar

Valeria A Parkhomova

Alexander William Robb Nelson

Alex T Rosalez

Purnima M Mavinkurve

Llwellyn J Mason

Techniques for use with electronic book readers include coordinating or translating position information between different versions of an electronic book. Positions within different versions can be translated for various purposes, such as transferring annotations between versions or synchronizing positions within different versions.

Book version mapping

In some implementations, a device displays supplemental information in connection with a digital work. The supplemental information may include a visual representation that represents one or more occurrences of an object in the digital work. The visual representation may include an area representative of an expanse of the digital work. At least one marking is located in the area in correlation to a location of an occurrence of the object in the digital work. In some examples, the visual representation may include a plurality of markings representing multiple occurrences of the object in the digital work, with a first or leftmost marking positioned in the area in proportion to a first occurrence of the object in the digital work. A second or rightmost marking may be positioned in the area in proportion to a final occurrence of the object in the digital work.

Visual representation of supplemental information for a digital work

Digital items may be lent from one user to another. A lending system may facilitate matching users that have a digital item to lend with users that wish to borrow a digital item. Each user may have a reputation associated with his or her lending behavior that is represented as a lending metric. The lending metric may show whether a given user is primarily a lender or borrower of digital items. Heavy borrowers that do not engage in commensurate lending may be penalized. Multiple users that lend and borrow digital items from one another may be connected in a social network. The nature of a relationship in the social network may and the lending metrics of users are factors used to make lending decisions.

Lending digital items to identified recipients

Techniques are described for identifying book title sets. The techniques may include a first-pass comparison with other books to identify other candidate title sets. A second-pass comparison may then be performed with respect to the candidate title sets. The first-pass comparison may be based on book metadata such as titles and authorship. The second-pass comparison may include a more comprehensive content comparison, such as comparing the body text of the books.

Identifying book title sets

Systems, methods and interfaces for sharing content access information associated with content among devices in a communication network are provided. One or more devices collect content access information related to the presentation of content to a user on user devices. Based on a determination of a synchronization event, the originating device transmits the collected content access information, resulting in the receipt of the content access information by a content management system. The content management system can process receiving content access information from various devices and user accounts and aggregate the processed content access information into one or more ordered lists. Thereafter, the content management system can publish, or otherwise make available, one or more of the ordered lists to various network resources, originating devices, or other user devices or user accounts.

Managing content access data in a communication network

While consuming digital content, a user may highlight a portion considered relevant or of interest. When this user highlight corresponds with an existing highlight created by other users in a community of users, a highlight match indicator is presented to the user. This indicator provides a positive reinforcement to the user that they have serendipitously highlighted a portion which others in the community of users found relevant.

User highlight match indicator

In some examples, an electronic device may present a portion of a content item in a first language contemporaneously with a corresponding portion in a second language. Thus, a user may view the portion of content in the first language and the same portion of content in the second language. Further, the electronic device may dynamically adjust an area allotted to displaying each language version, such as in the case that a portion of content in one language takes up more space than a matching portion of content in the other language. In some examples, metadata for multiple language versions of a content item may include mapping information for correlating a portion of the first language version of the content item with a matching or corresponding portion of the second language version of the content item based, at least in part, on location information.

Presenting content in multiple languages

In some implementations, text is extracted from a digital work and proper nouns are identified in the text to generate a list of names. The list of names may be sorted so that names containing more information are positioned toward the beginning of the list. The list may be traversed to cluster names and alternate names into name sets that correspond to particular entities in the digital work. Non-unique names that appear in more than one name set may be disambiguated based on proximity to unique names in the same name sets to determine which occurrences of the non-unique names belong with which name sets. Furthermore, a representative name may be selected from among multiple names in a name set for use in representing an entity or object corresponding to the name set. In some examples, the representative name may be selected based on a fullness of the name.

Identifying entities in a digital work

In some implementations, a service provider may enable location-based interaction of a user of a device with at least one of a digital work or another user. For instance, when the service provider determines that the device of the user is at a particular physical location, the service provider may send a communication to notify the user that one or more digital works are available to be accessed at the current physical location of the device. As one example, a digital work may have been virtually left at the location by another user, and the digital work may be available to be accessed by the user currently at the location. As another example, the user may be attending an event and the service provider may offer a digital work related to the event when the user is determined to be at the location of the event.

Location-based interaction with digital works

In some implementations, text is extracted from a digital work and a plurality of noun phrases are identified. The noun phrases are checked against a network accessible resource, such as an online encyclopedia, that includes a plurality of interlinked article entries. The noun phrases that have corresponding entries in the network accessible resource are included in a set of candidate topics. The candidate topics are ranked based, at least in part, on the links to and from each of the entries corresponding to the candidate topics. Candidate topics below a ranking threshold are removed from the set of candidate topics. Further, term frequency information for each candidate topic in relation to the digital work is compared against term frequency information for the candidate topic in a large corpus of textual works to remove candidate topics within a frequency difference threshold.

Identifying topics in a digital work

Digital content such as eBook may have several sections such as front matter, body matter, back matter, and so forth. To aid in the use of the content, it is worthwhile to find an end-of-body matter or other section breaks. As described herein, these sections may be determined by looking for keywords, specific formatting, manual intervention, last position read, and so forth. Once determined, tags may be generated which designate boundaries of these sections. These tags may then be used during consumption of the content.

Finding an end-of-body within content

User content access events pertaining to a content item, such as an e-book, audio, video file, and so on, are collected and analyzed to determine progress data, including abandonment information about when the content item, or a portion thereof, has been abandoned. Once determined, recommendations may be presented based on progress data from similar users.

Collection of progress data

In some implementations, a user of an electronic device may select a term of one or more words from the text of a displayed digital work. In response, a dictionary module may select a particular dictionary to access from among a plurality of dictionaries available on the electronic device. For example, based at least in part on metadata corresponding to the displayed digital work, the dictionary module may select a dictionary to access from a hierarchy of dictionaries. The dictionary module may present a definition obtained from the selected dictionary in a dictionary interface displayed over the presentation of the digital work. Further, the dictionary module may identify a location of at least one other occurrence of the selected term in the digital work or in a different digital work, and may display an excerpt of text including the at least one other occurrence of the selected term.

Dynamic dictionary based on context

A conversation management module receives user selections of sections in a digital media item from one or more users. The conversation management module also receives one or more comments associated with the selected sections. The conversation management module displays or provides conversation windows in a first portion of an interface, where each window associated with a selected section and displays comments associated with the selected section in the corresponding conversation window. The conversation management module also provides a list of users in a second portion of the interface and a list of keywords which appear in the comments in a third portion of the interface.

Multi-way and multi-thread conversation system

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Tom Killalea