Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Varun Narang

Hilliard Bruce Siegel

Udi Manber

Jeffrey P Bezos

Daniel Bibireata

Lawrence Gordon Tesler

Charles Gordon

Brian R Williams

Matthew J Rubens

A system and method for a librarian facilitates appraising the value of all or selected products in a collection of products. The collection of products may be part of a library that includes one or more photographic images of the library, and an inventory of the products revealed in those images. The librarian facilitates appraising the value of products in the collection with reference to the images. Appraisals may be automatically updated, and users notified in accordance with user notification preferences. An automated referral may be provided to the user to sell all or selected ones of the appraised inventory of products, individually or together. An extended appraisal may be provided to facilitate enhancing the value of a collection in the library.

Method and system for appraising a collection of products

A system and method for creating and maintaining a virtual library is provided. A virtual library includes one or more photographic images of the user's physical library, and an inventory of the products revealed in those images. The virtual librarian facilitates uploading the images, generating an inventory from those images, and locating products in the physical library with reference to the images. The virtual librarian optionally provides the user with an appraisal of the value of their physical library, and advice regarding how to organize the library and whether to make certain acquisitions to complement the existing library.

Method and system for creating and maintaining a virtual library

Verification of an inventory of stored products may be achieved by obtaining an image of the stored products and using text, optical character, and other feature recognition techniques to determine product identification and storage location. A comparison between earlier and current images of the same storage location is used to identify which locations have changed, i.e., from which locations have products been moved, removed, or added. The earlier and current images of the changed locations may be displayed to a user to visually inspect the differences between the images and verify the changes in inventory represented by those differences.

Method and system for inventory verification

A provider of content may provide access to portions of content from a source, but not the source content in its entirety. In some embodiments, one or more access rules or criteria may be implemented that enable users to access portions of the source content up to an allowed limit or threshold (e.g., number or percentage of pages), after which access is prevented to the remaining content that has not previously been accessed. In other embodiments, one or more access rules or criteria may be implemented that enable users to access portions of content of only a certain type (e.g., index, bibliography, introduction, certain chapters, etc.). Unauthorized portions are suppressed or access to them is denied. The content source may be a textual work, an audio work, or a video work of any form. For example, the content may be in electronic form, such as images of pages of content.

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Issaquah, WA, United States of America

Varun Narang