What’s That Book?
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
Oh, this was so necessary. What’s That Book is a website “founded by former Google Answers Researcher ‘Juggler,’” at which you, dear readers, can get real people to sleuth around for the identity of that book you almost-kind-of-sort-of remember from way back. You provide all the details you can muster, and the What’s That Book people do the rest. For free.
It’s also pretty fascinating to read about what other people are looking for, and the details they remember.
So when those customers come into the bookstore I work at part-time only knowing that the book was on Oprah–or was it NPR or in the New York Times or Mad Magazine?–and it was maybe in late 2003, early 2004, might have included some kind of information about the war in Iraq. Or was it 9/11? Or outsourcing jobs to India? Chinese infrastructure? And after spending a few frantic minutes trying to decipher what they want, it inevitably ends with, “Oh, forget it. I’ll just buy a DVD of ‘The Departed’ and a People magazine instead because it’s already at the counter and I won’t have to walk upstairs.”
Oooh–what bookstore do you work at? I work at Housing Works and we don’t even have a database and we’re mostly used books and it’s hilarious what people expect I’ll be able to mystically produce from my print-on-demand sphincter…