[vox-tech] amazon "search in the book" questions

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 01:25:22PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Consider this URL, which is a page inside a book about Green's functions:
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521282888/ref=sib_rdr_prev2_ex1/104-6467245-0944703?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00H&ns=1#reader-page
> 
> When I use the browser (FF) to print the page, the book's contents don't
> show up on the printed page.  Same thing when I use FF's preview print
> feature.
> 
> When I use left click "view image", the book page's contents disappear too.
> No matter where I click, the page title is "transparent pixel".
> 
> How exactly does Amazon do this?

>From what I've seen of how it works, I believe they use JavaScript to
swap the image in and out. That might affect why it doesn't print with
that; I don't know: however, I don't know how it doesn't show up when
you "view image".

...Of course, if they're using CSS to achieve layers, then they might be
putting the transparent pixel image in /front/ of the real image,
meaning that when you right-click on it, you're actually right-clicking
on the transparent pixel instead of the one you see. And I think the
printing stuff doesn't handle transparency, so that would make some
sense, too.

> Is there a way of saving the book page
> contents to an image file?  The only thing I could think of is taking a
> window image with GIMP or something like that.

That seems simplest. For more, you may have to dig around quite a bit to
check out the JavaScript, and any interactions with the server. Probably
not worth the hassle.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name